The Wisdom 

DICKENS 



Collected and urai 
from hsi writing* and 

letters by 'I empi 




MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

Publiiber 

NEW YORK 



Copyright, iyo$ y h Mitchell Kiwurlty 






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THE WISDOM OF D ICKKNS 
CONTENTS 



w ISDO M OK DICK I \ S 



I 

Introduction 11 rtMFU Scott i 

Riik N 
Death ind Immortalit) Evil ind Good 
Stand Finn \ s \uus( tlu- Forces oi Evil S 

Fa< lllS IVv v s.s \x I . M Sol N>Vi tin- In 

sptiei of the Faith W« Have in Itnmortalit) 

N Uth »nd ! 

rhe Dead l ivt to Comfort Us in Out Sonowi 
S< . . . ind Religion 10 

Doing t food Brings Its ( to n Secret [03 I lope 
in Heaven ind [Yost in God Our Best Staj 11 

Othei Roads to Heaven thin the Sectarian'i 

\J\uv to His Son on l»om£ to Polpoo. I I 

Vdvice to His Sou on I saving England I ; 

Out rears* Miss Moucher's Advice ra 

I o\ B INO M MR] ^GI l 

Puie I o\ e Marn ing t v ^ 1 I t» q 18 

I ove .it First Sight 19, 



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1 1 i 8 

I h 

\ \,> \)< zl i in fax It* ',' 

Fortune Humeri - 

p 

i ,; • If',.:; J | 

The Old Ti 'ail M 

ntei (6 

A Ride < ' •.. ■ 

: Landlady oi an Old EngtffJi Inn 



r u E \\ ISDO M F DICK E N S 

l 



I'm Country \np Komi mm 
Hie Effeci of the [deal \N orld on the Red 

Christmas Dai in the Victorian Days 51 

Christmas and Us Season >> 

English I lospitality > 6 

\ n Enchanted Mint [ulep 57 

Socu n 

The Universal Institution 

Bret d Gentility* rhe World of Fashion 69 

Podsnappery 63 

rhe Evils of Riches 66 

Manners and the Gentleman. Human \ul 

Hie Newh Rich* Injustice uid the Innocent 68 

Reputations Made by Fuss 69 

\ Prison foi Debtors 

rhe I ligh Court of Chancery of E ngland 

Hie Pooi People 5 

rhe Best Intentions of the Pooi 

Hie Pooi and I lomc 

Between me Devil .tml the Poop Sim Die 

1 ibourei ind His Struggle foi Rights 
\ 1 ondonSlum Hie Pooi ind .Then Revenge S4 
Government by Means of the Circumlocution 
Office So 



\ ff E v/i g DO M I D1CKE1 
centi 

8<M III / 

r rovernmem Sei ri< e </> 
Mrs. ^/lunHy Unconsciously Revealing Hei 

•.'If Humanity Natural and Unnatural 04 

^ ;i pjt ;j j Punishment 98 

Letter, to J'nends Written j r j Imagination zoo 

'I he Apathy of ;j People ^> If. Own Welfare 101 

Mem awd Women 104 

A fjood Man. 1 he Unco' Guid and the Unco* 

Rich 105 

'I be Diaries of the Wir ked 1 1 1 

'I he Man of Fans I 1/ 

'1 he S< orn< r of Ideals I I J 

The Memorable Day in Every Life- The 
Philosophy of a Cheap Jack ai Hisl radc 

and ;it I Jorn<- I 14 

Womanly Tempei Especially When Living 
in ;i Carl 126 

'Mm- Hand the Index to food's Goodness [28 

'Jli'- Seme of Injustice in Children- J he 

Young Person [29 

huty the Bra gga rt 13c 

'I he Amerii an Eagle 131 

'i fie Philosophy of Catching a Hal in the Wind IJ2 



Til V W 1 S DO M O V DICK EN S 
Contents 



Men and Women paqi 
The Long-suffering of Women. There's .1 

Soft Place in the Hardest of Hearts 133 

A Rogue Restrained by [Miserly Instincts [34 
An Author's Fame. Americans render to 

Criticism 135 

A Doctor the Type 136 
The Cure tor the Gout The Old-time Sick 

Nurse and Midwife 138 

The Toiling Poor and Their Reformers 142 
Rogues are the Most Credulous of Beings 

Servant and Master 14^ 

The "Gushing Girl" ot a Respectable Father 144 

Records of Old Families 145 

The Hooks Dickens Read as a Boy 140 

The Respectable Englishman 14S 

Memory of Very Early Childhood 150 

Advice to a Young Author 151 

What Dickens Thought of Washington Irving is~ 

Our Ignorance of Shakespeare the Man a Com- 
fort 154 

The Evils ot' .1 Biographer a la BosweH Dick- 
ens o\\ Mis Own Cienius. The Value of 

lime to Him 1 55 

Forster's Lite o( Goldsmith 157 



J HE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



INTRODUCTION BY TEMPLE SCOTT 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Introduction by Temple Scott 

CHARLES DICKENS, whatever else be 
may be, is the English humourist. He 
takes his place by the side of Swift, Steele, Gold- 
smith, Fielding, and Sterne. He differs from 
these, of course ; but the difference is the difference 
of the centuries in which they lived. The char- 
acteristic he has in common with his earlier 
brothers in letters is the English quality of his 
point of vieiv, and what may be called the non- 
intellectual it v of the basis on which his humour 
played. He is of the genuine soil. The men 
and women who were created in the heat of his 
imagination are the common people of the com- 
mon day ; they are all near to mother earth, and 
all redolent of the smoke of every-day human 
strife. Dickens himself was of the commonalty, 
and in saying this I do not intend any disparage- 
ment of his genius ; rather, the contrary. He 
was true to the truth of his experience, even 
if he transfigured his creations in the golden 
light of his imagination. Exaggeration is abund- 
ant with him, but the evils of its over-indul- 
gence become softened and lost in the dexterous 

i 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Introduction by Temple Scott 

handling of the colours. Humour is rarely 
intellectual, in the purer sense of the word ; it 
belongs to the levels of experience, and finds its 
real homes in the highways and byways, or in 
the narrow, crowded streets where men and women 
jostle each other indiscriminately, rub each 
other's shoulders and touch the risibilities to the 
quick by uncourteous selfishness. 

Tears are close to laughter ; indeed, they each 
come with the other. The other side of humour 
is pathos ; and what one man sees as pathetic, 
another, differently endowed by nature, it 
strikes as humorous. Laughter-moving as 
Dickens is, he is also strong in compelling tears ; 
and like his humour, his pathos is non-intel- 
lectual also. It smacks of vulgarity even, so 
true is it to the common life. It is even melo- 
dramatic and sets the teeth on edge of those who 
have become steeled in the courteous amenities of 
the higher social life. 

The rope on which wisdom dances is humour, 
and wise indeed is he who can balance himself in 
laughter on the strands of truth. Dickens is of 



r in WISDOM 1 DICK E N S 
Introduction bi rempk Scott 



lips oi 

Y g§ r, c M n M •..'■.•..; j . I ■'. • 

D V ..: H .-■■•• ■. x. .; M . 

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3 



\ H E v/i 8 DOM I DICK E 



introduction by 'I ( 



discordant to the finer senses oj the cultivated, bis 
humour may seem a little vulgar and his pathos 
more often than not, forced and artificial) calling 

for our tear: a: ij VAth the dow mUSU and the 

lime light of the penny gaff* Bui lei ui he frank 

and COnfeSi that WC are all oj u: 7 am Sarrr.on: 

bairns* We may rii in the orchestra unto gloved 

hands, hut when the master flays f jur palm: heat 
the applau.r unwilled, and in the dim theatre- 
l nil >f -lie furtively hru:h av;ay the tear. Ye:, 
there ; a great deal oj human nature .till left in 
us y and Dickens dray,: it out. 

J he truth is we mu:t read Dickens hare-'.ouled. 
We mu:l he like the children at their jairy tale: 
to whom what they read i: :o real and certain. 
Ij v;e briny not this child attitude to the reading 
oj Dickens 'jur enjoyment v. ill he : polled. It 
will not he Dickens* S fault that we cannot take 
him in; it will he our misfortune visited upon 

us because of a too sophisticated observation of 

the mimic presentations of life* I I ay it in 
prav.e oj Die hen: a: a dramatist jor he is that — 
that he Vjill not abide vjith us unless we welcome 

4 



Til 1 WISDOM OF DICKE NS 



Introduction by Temple Scott 



and receive him with the open arms of hospitality; 
with the simple, courteous expectancy oj pleasure 
that children pay to those- master raconteurs of 
all time who have charmed them with illusions. 

Lei any one of us lock himself in the quiet of a 

cosy room, with the lamp-light clear on the table, 

a fine log-fire blazing on the hearth, a comfortable 
chair to sit in, and a book by Charles Dickens to 
read. What a time he will have ! All day long, 
aye, and most of the evening too, he may have 
been busy attending the school of life, and con- 
forming to the rules of its schoolmaster. Noiv 
comes the witching time of playing truant. 
What a time he will have! He can be himself 
once more, to laugh or to cry, as he feels like it, 
and whether he feels like it or not. The book 
once begun he comes under the spell of another 
master now, and he will iance to his pipe till the 
hours of night pass into the hours of the morning, 
and be will not be wearied. He will forget cr 
avoid those passages in which Dickens cannot 
help playing the moralist — so many Englishmen 
still carry that Puritan strain in them — and he 

5 



\ H E wi S DO M 01 Dl CK E 



pdttCtJOfl by 'I | n p | - 0C1 



will know men and women who ij they never lived ', 
certainly deserved to live. But they will live with 
him, now and for alway: I J i t hi u.k a n d ji nyle ; 
Fagatt and Sykes; Little Dortit and her father; 
joe Gargery and fVemmick ; Traddles and Peg- 

gotty; Micawber and Mantalini ; Silas Wegg 

and Boffin; Mark Tapley and Pecksniff ; Tom 
Pinch and but their names are almOSi a: the 
tattds in number. They are a: real a: the 
people of a city ; aye, even more ; for the people 
Of a city we rarely knovj, whereas thrr.e children 
oj Dicken/ S Land have been made known to US 
to the fine 'A fibre: of their natur. 

Dickem must ever remain the mo:t widely 
read of English men of letters. His appeal i: 
not to any particular ape or to any special order 
of mind ; it is to all ape: and to the common 
mind. He is the clown and pantaloon by turns, 
and the decade: shall 'Jill unroll in which shall 
be born the sons and daughters of men and vjomen 
who shall crow and cry at the play of this delight- 
ful pantomime which we know as the Works of 
Charles Dickens. 

6 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
RELIGION 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Death and Immortality 

r PHE golden ripple on the wall came back 
again, and nothing else stirred in the room. 
The old, old fashion! The fashion that came 
in with our first garments, and will last un- 
changed until our race has run its course, and 
the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. 
The old, old fashion — Death! Oh, thank God, 
all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of 
Immortality! And look upon us, angels of 
young children, with regards not quite estranged, 
when the swift river bears us to the ocean ! 

Dombey and Son. 

Evil and Good 

'"PHIS is the eternal law. Evil often stops 
short at itself and dies with the doer of 
it; but good, never. Our Mutual Friend. 

Stand Firm Against the Forces of Evil 

/^J.OD help the man whose heart ever changes 
with the world, as an old mansion when 
it becomes an inn! Barnaby Rudge. 



ill E w l SDOM OF DICK ENS 
Facitis Descensus Averni 

TN journeys, as in life, it is a great deal easier 

to go down hill than up. 

Nick las Nickleby, 

Sorrow the Inspire! of the Faith We Hj\<. in Immortality 

TN PO her mind] as into all others contending 
with the great affliction oi our mortal na- 
ture, there had stolen solemn wonderings and 
hopes, arising in the dim world beyond the 
present life, and murmuring, like faint music, 
of recognition in the far-off land between her 
brother and her mother; of some present con- 
sciousness in both of her; some love and com- 
miseration for her; and some knowledge of her 

as she went her way Upon the earth. 

D ?<w. 

Youth and Treachery 

tiHPREACHERY don't come natural to beam- 
ing youth; but trust and pity, love and 
constancy,— they do, thank God!' 

Mrs* Lirriptrs Legacy* 

9 



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Nicholas Nickleby. 
Science 2nd VaMp/m 

\ r OTH ING 

■ ■ 
■ 

Letter "-, M I)e Or 



N ( 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Doing Good Brings Its Own Secret Joy 

OTHING ever happened on this globe, for 
good, at which some people did not have 
their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing 
that such as these would be blind anyway, he 
thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle 
up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less 
attractive forms. His own heart laughed; and 
that was quite enough for him. 

A Christmas Carol. 

Hope in Heaven and Trust in God Our Best Stay. 

TN this world there is no stay but the hope of 
a better, and no reliance but on the mercy 
and goodness of God. Through these two har- 
bours o( a shipwrecked heart, I fully believe 
that you will, in time, find a peaceful resting- 
place even on this careworn earth. Heaven 
speed the time and do you try hard to help it on! 
It is impossible to say but that our prolonged 
grief for the beloved dead may grieve them in 
the unknown abiding-place, and give them trou- 
ble. Letter to Mrs. A. H. La yard. 

Oct. 7, 1862. 
11 



THE WISDOM () F DICK E N S 
Other Roads to Heaven than the Sectarian's. 

TN love of virtue and hatred of vice, in the de- 
testation of cruelty and encouragement of 
gentleness and mercy, all men who endeavor to 
be acceptable to their Creator in any way, may 
freely agree. There are more roads to Heaven, 
I am inclined to think, than -my sect believes; 
but there can be none which have not these 
flowers garnishing the way. 

Letter to a Correspondent. 

April X, 1841. 

Dickens's Advice to His Son on Going to CoHege 

\XfHATEVER you do, above all other things 
keep out of debt and confide in me. If 
ever you find yourself on the verge of any per- 
plexity or difficulty, come to me. You will 
never find me hard with you while you an- man- 
ly and truthful. . . . You know that you have 
never been hampered with religious forms of 
restraint, and that with mere unmeaning forms 
I have no sympathy. Hut 1 most strongly and 
affectionately impress upon you the priceless 
value of the New Testament, and the study of 

12 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Dickens's Advice to His Son on Going to College 

that book as the one unfailing guide in life. 
Deeply respecting it, and bowing down before 
the character of our Saviour, as separated from 
the vain constructions and inventions of men, 
you cannot go very wrong, and will always pre- 
serve at heart a true spirit of veneration and 
humility. Similarly I impress upon you the 
habit of saying a Christian prayer every night 
and morning. These things have stood by me 
all through my life, and remember that I tried 
to render the New Testament intelligible to 
you and lovable by you when you were a mere 
baby. And so God bless you. 

Letter to Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens. 

Dickens's Advice to His Son on Leaving England 

I NEED not tell you that I love you dearly, 
and am very, very sorry in my heart to part 
with you. But this life is half made up of part- 
ings, and these pains must be borne. It is my 
comfort and my sincere conviction that you are 
going to try the life for which you are best fitted. 

J 3 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Dickens's Advice to His Son on Leaving England 

I think its freedom and wildness more suited to 
you than any experiment in a study or office would 
ever have been; and without that training, you 
could have followed no other suitable occupation. 

What you have already wanted until now has 
been a set, steady, constant purpose. I there- 
fore exhort you to persevere in a thorough de- 
termination to do whatever you have to do as 
well as you can do it. I was not so old as you 
are now when I first had to win my food, and 
do this out of this determination, and I have 
never slackened in it since. 

Never take a mean advantage of anyone in 
any transaction, and never be hard upon people 
who are in your power. Try to do to others, as 
you would have them do to you, and do not be 
discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much 
better for you that they should fail in obeying 
the greatest rule laid down by our Saviour, than 
that you should. 

I put a New Testament among your books, 
for the very same reasons, and with the very 
same hopes, that made me write an easy account 

H 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Dickens's Advice to His Son on Leaving England 

of it for you, when you were a little child; be- 
cause it is the best book that ever was or will be 
known in the world, and because it teaches you 
the best lessons by which any human creature 
who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can 
possibly be guided. As your brothers have 
gone away, one by one, I have written to each 
such words as I am now writing to you, and 
have entreated them all to guide themselves by 
this book, putting aside the interpretations and 
inventions of men. 

You will remember that you have never at 
home been wearied about religious observances 
or mere formalities. I have always been anx- 
ious not to weary my children with such things 
before they are old enough to form opinions re- 
specting them. You will therefore understand 
the better that I now most solemnly impress 
upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian 
religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the 
impossibility of your going far wrong if you 
humbly but heartily respect it. 

Only one thing more on this head. The 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Dickens's Advice to His Son on Leaving England 

more we are in earnest as to feeling it, the less 
we are disposed to hold forth about it. Never 
abandon the wholesome practice of saying your 
own private prayers, night and morning. I 
have never abandoned it myself, and I know 
the comfort of it. 

I hope you will always be able to say in after 
life, that you had a kind father. You cannot 
show your affection for him so well, or make 
him so happy, as by doing your duty. 

Letter to Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens. 

Our Tears 



H 



EAVEN knows we need never be ashamed 
of our tears, for they are rain upon the 
blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. 

Great Expectations. 



Miss Moucher's Advice 



^TPRY not to associate bodily defects with 
A mental, my good friend, except for a 
solid reason. David Copperfield. 

16 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
LOVE AND MARRIAGE 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Pure Love 

I2UT it is not in the nature of pure love to 
burn so fiercely and unkindly long. The 
flame that in its grosser composition has the 
taint of earth may prey upon the breast that 
gives it shelter; but the sacred fire from heaven 
is as gentle in the heart as when it rested on the 
heads of the assembled twelve, and showed each 
man his brother, brightened and unhurt. 

Dombey and Son. 

Marrying for Love 

k 1 4 HUS two people who cannot afford to play 
cards for money, sometimes sit down to a 
quiet game for love. 

Some ill-conditioned persons who sneer at the 
life matrimonial, may perhaps suggest, in this 
place, that the good couple would be better 
likened to two principals in a sparring match, 
who, when fortune is low and backers scarce, 
will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure 
of buffeting; and in one respect indeed this 
comparison would hold good: for, as the adven- 

18 



TH E WISDOM OF DICK IN S 
Marrying for Love 

turous pair of the Fives' Court will afterward 
send round a hat, and trust to the bounty of 
the lookers-on for the means of regaling them- 
selves, so Mr. Godfrey Nickleby and bis partner, 
the honeymoon being over, looked wistfully out 
into the world, relying in no considerable degree 
upon chance for the improvement oi their 
means. Nicholas Nickleby* 

I o\t- .it First Sight 

OVE at first sight is a trite expression quite 
Sufficiently discussed; enough that in cer- 
tain smouldering natures that passion leaps into 
a blaze, and makes such head as tire does in a 
rage oi' wind, when other passions, hut for its 
mastery, could he held in chains. As a multi- 
tude of weak imitative natures are always lying 
by, ready to go mad upon the next wrong idea 
that may he broached . . . so these less ordi- 
nary natures may lie by for years, ready on the 
touch o\ an instant to hurst into Maine. 

Our Mutual Friend. 
»9 



B 



Tfl E WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Advice to Young Married Couples 

EFORE marriage and afterward, let them 
learn to centre all their hopes of real and 
lasting happiness in their own fireside; let them 
cherish the faith that in home, and all the Eng- 
lish virtues which the love of home engenders, 
lies the only true source of domestic felicity; 
let them believe that round the household gods 
contentment and tranquillity cluster in their 
gentlest and most graceful forms, and that 
many weary hunters of happiness through the 
noisy world have learned this truth too late, 
and found a cheerful spirit and a quiet mind only 
at home at last. Sketches of Young Couples. 



A Married Woman's Reli 



gion 



CiVTELLER," she says, "I'm afeard I've not 
done by you quite wot I ought to have 
done; you're a wery kind-hearted man, and I 
might ha' made your home more comfortable. 
I begin to see now/' she says, "veil it's too late, 
that if a married 'ooman vishes to be religious 
she should begin with dischargin' her dooties at 

20 



ill l w l SDO M OF DICK EN S 
\ Married Woman's Religion 



home, and makin' them as is aboul her cheerful 
and happy, and that vile she goes to church, or 
chapel, or wot not, .it .ill proper times, she 
should be veiy careful not to con-wert this sort 
o' thing into an excuse for idleness or self- 
indulgence, or vurse. I bavi done tins," she 
says, and I've vasted tunc and substance on 
them as has done it more than me; but I hope 
ven I'm gone, Veller, thai you'll think on meas 
I wos afore I know'd them people, and as 1 
rah was by natur." Pickwick Papers* 

Happiness of Friendship 

i^OMK beloved companionship Fades out of 
most lives- but the happiness \n .is. 

Out Mutual Frttnm* 

\ Marriage of Convenience 



S HE 



is regularly bought, and you may take 
your oath, bi is as regularlf sold! 

Doml't'v and Soti. 

21 



I ll E WIS DOM I DICKEH 

Love Makes the World Go Round 

A ND oh, there arc days in this life worth life 
and death. And oh, what a bright old 
song it is, that oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love 
that makes the world go round! 

Our Mutual I'riend. 



Maternal I'ri'h: 

DRIDE is one of the seven deadly sins; hut 
it cannot he the pride of a mother in her 

children, for that is a compound of two car- 
dinal virtues — faith and hope. 

Nicholas Nickleby. 

The Mother in Our Memories 

r^ROM the moment of my knowing of the 
death of my mother, the idea of her as she 
had been of late had vanished from me. I 
remembered her, from that instant, only as the 
young mother of my earliest impressions, who 
had been used to wind her bright curls round 

22 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Mother in Our Memories 

and round her ringer, and to dance with me at 
twilight in the parlour. ... It may be curious, 
but it is true. In her death she winged her way 
back to her calm untroubled youth, and can- 
celled all the rest. 

The mother who lay in the grave, was the 
mother of my infancy, the little creature in her 
arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed 
for ever on her bosom. David Copperfield. 

The Middle-Class English Father 

TV/TY respected father — let me shorten the 
dutiful tautology by substituting in fu- 
ture M.R.F., which sounds military, and rather 
like the Duke of Wellington, . . . M.R.F. 
having always in the clearest manner provided 
(as he calls it) for his children by pre-arranging 
from the hour of the birth of each, and some- 
times from an earlier period, what the devoted 
little victim's calling and course in life should 
be; M.R.F. pre-arranged for myself that I was 
to be the barrister I am (with the slight addition 

23 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Middle-Class English Father 

of an enormous practice, which has not accrued), 
and also the married man I am not. . . . 
When my eldest brother was born, of course the 
rest of us knew (I mean the rest of us would 
have known, if we had been in existence) that 
he was heir to the family embarrassments — 
we call it before company the family estate. 
But when my second brother was going to be 
born by and by, "This," says M.R.F., "is a lit- 
tle pillar of the church." Was born, and became 
a pillar of the church; a very shaky one. My 
third brother appeared considerably in advance 
of his engagement to my mother; but M.R.F., 
not at all put out by surprise, instantly declared 
him a circumnavigator. Was pitchforked into 
the navy, but has not circumnavigated. I 
announced myself, and was disposed of with 
the highly satisfactory results embodied before 
you. When my youngest brother was half an 
hour old, it was settled by M.R F. that he should 
have a mechanical genius, and so on. There- 
fore, I say, M.R.F. amuses me. 

Our Mutual Friend. 
24 



ill I w i S DOM ov DICK l N S 



Mai ria&e foi 1 o> e Alone 



r had .i great deal of work to do, and had many 
anxieties, but considerations [for her natural 
happiness] made me keep them to myself. I 
am far from sure, now, that it was right to do 
tins; but 1 did it for my child-wife's sake. I 
search my breast, and 1 commit its secrets, it 
I know them, without any reservation to this 
paper. I he old unhappy loss or want of some- 
thing had, 1 am conscious, some place in my 
heart; but not to the embitterment of my life. 
When 1 walked .done in the fine weather, and 
thought of the summer days when .ill the air 
had been filled with my boyish enchantment, I 
did miss something oi the realization of my 
tit cams; but I thought it w.is .i softened glory 
ol the Past, winch nothing could have thrown 
u^on the present time. I did feel, sometimes, 
tor a little while, that I could have wished my 
wife had been my counsellor; had had more 

character and purpose, to sustain me and im- 
prove me b\; had been endowed with power 

to fill up the VOld which somewhere seemed to 
be about me; but I tell as it" this were an un- 



I ll E wi S DOM 01 DI< K I 

Marriage for Lov« Akmc 



earthly consummation of my happiness, that 
never had been meant to be, ana never could 
have heen. ... 'J here can be no disparity in 
marriage like unsuitability of mind and pur- 
pose. David Cop per field. 

A Poor Man's Wife and the Joy. of Life With Her 

' I * I f h N our pleasures! Dear me, they are in- 
expensive, but they are quite wonderful! 
When we ;ire at home here, of an evening, and 
shut the outer door, and draw those curtain', 
which she made— where could we he more snug ? 
When it's fine, and we go out for a walk in the 
evening, the streets abound in enjoyment for us. 
We look into the glittering windows of the 
jewellers' shops, and I show Sophy which of the 
diamond-eyed serpents, coiled up on white satin 
rising grounds, 1 would give her if J could afford 
it; and Sophy shows me which of the gold 
watches that are capped and jewelled and en- 
gine-turned, and possessed of the horizontal 
lever-escape movement, and all sorts of things, 

j6 



l ill \Y IS DOM F DICK E N S 

A Poor M.m's Wife .uul (In* Jo\s o\ I \\c With Hci 

she would buy for me it $bi could afford it; .mil 
we pick out the spoons .uul forks, fish-slices, 

butter-knives, and sugar-tongs, we should both 
prefer, it we both could afford it; and really we 
go away as if we had got them! Thou we stroll 
into the squares, and great streets, and see a 
house to let; sometimes we look up at it, and 

say, how would that do, if I was made judge? 
And then we parcel it out such a room for US, 
and such a room tor the girls, and so forth; 

until we settle to our satisfaction that it would 

do, or it wouldn't do, as the ease mav be. 
Sometimes we go at half-price to the pit of the 
theatre the very smell oi which is cheap, in 
my opinion, at the money and there we 

thoroughly enjoy the play: which Sophy be- 
lieves every Word o\, and so do 1. In walking 
home, perhaps we buy a little hit ot* something at 
a cook's shop, or a little lobster at the fishmon- 
ger's, and bring it here, and make a splendid 
supper, chatting about w hat we have seen. Now , 
you know, Copperfield, if I was Lord Chancellor, 
we couldn't do this! David CopperfiiU* 

»7 



I HE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



BUSINESS 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Micawber's Advice 

1V/TY advice is, never do to-morrow what you 
can do to-day. Procrastination is the 
thief of time. Collar him. . . . My other 
piece of advice you know. Annual income, 
twenty pounds, annual expenditure, nine- 
teen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual in- 
come, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, 
twenty ought and six, result misery. The 
blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god 
of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and — 
and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am. 

David Copperfield. 

A Reference 

44 A S to being a reference," said Pancks, "you 
"^ know in a general way, what being a 
reference means. It's all your eye, that is. 
Look at your tenants down the yard here. 
They'd all be references for one another, if 
you'd let 'em. What would be the good of 
letting 'em ? It's no satisfaction to be done by 
two men instead of one. One's enough. A 

29 



THE WISDOM OF DICKK N S 



A Reference 



person who can't pay, gets another person who 
can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like 
a person with two wooden legs, getting another 
person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that 
he has got two natural legs. It don't make 
either of them able to do a walking match. 
And four wooden legs are more troublesome 
than two, when you don't want any." 

Little Dorrit. 

The Specialist and the Ignorant 

FT has always been my opinion since I first 
possessed such a thing as an opinion, that 
the man who knows only one subject is next tire- 
some to the man who knows no subject. 

The Holly Tree. 

Business Maxim 

CiT-IERE'S the rule for bargains. 'Do other 
men, for they would do you.' That's 
the true business precept. All others are coun- 
terfeits." Martin Chuzzlewit. 

30 



YU E W l S DOM OF DICK EN S 

The Dealer in Stocks 

A S IS well known to the wise in their genera- 
tion, traffic in shares is the one thing to 
have to do with in this world. Have no ante- 
cedents, no established character, no cultivation, 

no ideas, no manners; have shares. Have 
shares enough to he on boards of direction in 

capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business 
between London and Paris, and be great. 
Where does he come from : Shares. Where is 
he going to ? Shares. What are his tastes ; 
Shares. Has he any principles ? Shares. What 
squeezes him into parliament : Shares. Per- 
haps he never of himself achieved success in 
anything, never originated anything, never pro- 
duced anything! Sufficient answer to all: 
Shares. mightv shares! To set those blar- 
ing images so high, and to cause us smaller 
vermin, as under the influence o\ henbane or 
opium, to cry out night and day: "Relieve us 
o( our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell 
us, ruin us, only we beseech ye, take rank among 
the powers of the earth, and fatten on us." 

Our Mutual Friend* 
ti 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



Fortune Hunters — The World is Filled With Them 



C4 A LL men are fortune-hunters, are they not ? 
The law, the church, the court, the camp 
— see how they are all crowded with fortune- 
hunters, jostling each other in the pursuit. 
The stock-exchange, the pulpit, the counting- 
house, the royal drawing-room, the senate, — 
what but fortune-hunters are they filled with ? 
A fortune-hunter! Yes. You are one; and 
you would be nothing else, my dear Ned, if you 
were the greatest courtier, lawyer, legislator, 
prelate, or merchant, in existence. If you are 
squeamish and moral, Ned, console yourself 
with the reflection that at the very worst your 
fortune-hunting can make but one person mis- 
erable or unhappy. How many people do you 
suppose these other kinds of huntsmen crush 
in following their sport — hundreds at a step ? 
Or thousands ?" Barnaby Rudge. 



3* 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



THE COUNTRY AND HOME 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Old Time Wassail 

[T was high time to make the Wassail now; 
therefore I had up the materials (which, 
together with their proportions and combina- 
tions, I must decline to impart, as the only 
secret of my own I was ever known to keep), 
and made a glorious jorum. Not in a bowl; 
for a bowl anywhere but on a shelf is a low 
superstition, fraught with cooling and slopping; 
but in a brown earthenware pitcher, tenderly 
suffocated, when full, with a coarse cloth. It 
being now upon the stroke of nine, I set out for 
Watts's Charity, carrying my brown beauty in 
my arms. I would trust Ben, the waiter, with 
untold gold; but there are strings in the human 
heart which must never be sounded by another, 
and drinks that I make myself are those strings 
in mine. 

The Travellers were all assembled, the cloth 
was laid, and Ben had brought a great billet of 
wood, and had laid it artfully on the top of the 
fire, so that a touch or two of the poker after 
supper should make a roaring blaze. Having 
deposited my brown beauty in a red nook of the 
34 



T H E WISD M F PICK E N S 

The Old Time Wassail 

hearth, inside the tender, where she soon began 
to sing like an ethereal cricket, diffusing at the 
same time odours as of ripe vineyards, spiee 
forests, and orange groves, - 1 say, having sta- 
tioned my beauty in a place of security and im- 
provement, I introduced mvselt to my guests by 
shaking hands all round, and giving them a 
hearty welcome. . . . 

When supper was done, and my brown beauty 
had been elevated on the table, there was a gen- 
eral requisition to me to "take the corner"; 
which suggested to me comfortably enough how 
much my friends have made of a fire, — for 
when had I ever thought so highly of the corner, 
since the days when 1 connected it with Jack 
Horner.' However, as I declined. Ren. whose 
touch on all convivial instruments is perfect, 
drew the table apart, and instructing my lra\- 
ellers to open right and left on either side of me, 
and form round the fire, closed up the centre 
with myself and my chair, and preserved the 
order we had kept at table. . . . 

This was the time for bringing the poker to 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Old Time Wassail 

bear on the billet of wood. I tapped it three 
times, like an enchanted talisman, and a bril- 
liant host of merrymakers burst out of it, and 
sported off by the chimney, — rushing up the 
middle in a fiery country dance, and never com- 
ing down again. Meanwhile, by their spark- 
ling light, which threw our lamp into the shade, 
I rilled the glasses, and gave my Travellers, 
Christmas! — christmas-eve, my friends, when 
the shepherds, who were poor Travellers, too, in 
their wav, heard the Angels sing "On earth, 
peace. Good-will toward men!" 

The Seven Poor- Travellers, 

A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

TT was still dark when we left the Peacock. 
For a little while, pale, uncertain ghosts of 
houses and trees appeared and vanished, and 
then it was hard, black, frozen day. People 
were lighting their fires; smoke was mounting 
straight up high into the rarefied air; and we 
were rattling for Highgate Arch wav over the 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of 
iron shoes on. As we got into the country, 
everything seemed to have grown old and gray: 
the roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages 
and homesteads, the ricks in farmers' yards. 
Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs 
at roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers 
lounged about, doors were close shut, little turn- 
pike houses had blazing fires inside and chil- 
dren (even turnpike people have children, and 
seem to like them) rubbed the frost from the 
little panes of glass with their chubby arms, 
that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of 
the solitary coach going by. I don't know when 
the snow began to set in; but I know that we 
were changing horses somewhere when I heard 
the guard remark, "That the old lady up in the 
sky was picking her geese pretty hard to-day." 
Then, indeed, I found the white down falling 
fast and thick. 

The lonelv day wore on, and I dozed it out, 
as a lonely traveller does. I was warm and 
valiant after eating and drinking, — particularly 

37 



THE WISDO M OF DICKENS 
A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

after dinner; cold and depressed at all other 
times. I was always bewildered as to time and 
place, and always more or less out of my senses. 
The coach and horses seemed to execute in 
chorus Auld Lang Syne, without a moment's 
intermission. They kept the time and tune 
with the greatest regularity, and rose into the 
swell at the beginning of the refrain, with a 
precision that worried me to death. While we 
changed horses, the guard and coachman went 
stamping up and down the road, printing off 
their shoes in the snow, and poured so much 
liquid consolation into themselves without 
being any the worse for it, that I began to con- 
found them, as it darkened again, with two 
great white casks standing on end. Our horses 
tumbled down in solitary places, and we got 
them up, — which was the pleasantest variety / 
had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and 
snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off 
snowing. All night long we went on in this 
manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon 
the Great North Road, to the performance of 

38 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

Auld Lang Syne by day again. And it snowed 
and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left 
off snowing. 

I forget now where we were at noon on the 
second day, and where we ought to have been; 
but I know that we were scores of miles behind- 
hand, and that our case was growing worse 
every hour. The drift was becoming prodig- 
iously deep; landmarks were getting snowed 
out; the road and the fields were all one; in- 
stead of having fences and hedge-rows to guide 
us, we went crunching on over an unbroken 
surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath 
us at any moment and drop us down a whole 
hillside. Still the coachman and guard — who 
kept together on the box, always in council, and 
looking well about them — made out the track 
with astonishing sagacity. 

When we came in sight of a town, it looked, 
to my fancy, like a large drawing on a slate, 
with abundance of slate pencil expended on the 
churches and houses where the snow lay thick- 
est. When we came within a town, and found 

39 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

the church clocks all stopped, the dial-faces 
choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, 
it seemed as if the whole place was overgrown 
with white moss. As to the coach, it was a 
mere snow-ball; similarly, the men and boys 
who ran along beside us to the town's end, turn- 
ing our clogged wheels and encouraging our 
horses, were men and boys of snow; and the 
bleak, wild solitude to which they at last dis- 
missed us was a snowy Sahara. One would 
have thought this enough; notwithstanding 
which, I pledge my word that it snowed and 
snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off 
snowing. 

We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; 
seeing nothing, out of towns and villages, but the 
track of stoats, hares, and foxes, and some- 
times of birds. At nine o'clock at night, on a 
Yorkshire moor, a cheerful burst from our horn, 
and a welcome sound of talking, with a glim- 
mering and moving about of lanterns, roused 
me from my drowsy state. I found that we 
were going to change. 

40 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

A Coach-ride in England in Winter 

They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, 
whose bare head became as white as King 
Lear's in a single minute, ''What Inn is this ?" 

"The Holly-Tree, sir," said he. 

"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apolo- 
getically, to the guard and coachman, " that I 
must stop here." The Holly Tree. 

A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

A ND really it might have confused a less 
modest man than Tom to find himself 
sitting next that coachman; for of all the swells 
that ever flourished a whip, professionally, he 
might have been elected emperor. He didn't 
handle his gloves like another man, but put 
them on — even when he was standing on the 
pavement, quite detached from the coach — as 
if the four grays were, somehow or other, at the 
ends of his fingers. It was the same with his 
hat. He did things with his hat, which nothing 
but an unlimited knowledge of horses and the 
wildest freedom of the road, could ever have 

41 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

made him perfect in. Valuable little parcels 
were brought to him with particular instruc- 
tions, and he pitched them into this hat, and 
stuck it on again; as if the laws of gravity did not 
admit of such an event as its being knocked off 
or blown off, and nothing like an accident could 
befall it. The guard, too! Seventy breezy 
miles a day were written in his very whiskers. 
His manners were a canter; his conversation a 
round trot. He was a fast coach upon a down- 
hill turnpike-road; he was all pace. A wagon 
couldn't have moved slowly, with that guard 
and his key-bugle on the top of it. 

These were all foreshadowings of London, 
Tom thought, as he sat upon the box, and 
looked about him. Such a coachman and such 
a guard never could have existed between 
Salisbury and any other place. The coach was 
none of your steady-going, yokel coaches, but 
a swaggering, rakish, dissipated London coach; 
up all night, and lying by all day, and leading 
a devil of a life. It cared no more for Salis- 
bury than if it had been a hamlet. It rattled 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

noisily through the best streets, defied the cathe- 
dral, took the worst corners sharpest, went cut- 
ting in everywhere, making everything get out 
of its way; and spun along the open country- 
road, blowing a lively defiance out of its key- 
bugle, as its last glad parting legacy. 

It was a charming evening. Mild and bright. 
And even with the weight upon his mind which 
arose out of the immensity and uncertainty of 
London, Tom could not resist the captivating 
sense of rapid motion through the pleasant air. 
The four grays skimmed along, as if they liked it 
quite as well as Tom did; the bugle was in as 
high spirits as the grays; the coachman chimed 
in sometimes with his voice; the wheels hummed 
cheerfully in unison; the brass work on the har- 
ness was an orchestra of little bells; and thus, 
as they went clinking, jingling, rattling smoothly 
on, the whole concern, from the buckles of the 
leaders* coupling-reins, to the handle of the hind 
boot, was one great instrument of music. 

Yoho, past hedges, gates and trees; past cot- 
tages and barns, and people going home from 

43 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside 
into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant 
horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little 
water-course, and held by struggling carters 
close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had 
passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, 
by churches dropped down by themselves in 
quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about 
them, where the graves are green, and daisies 
sleep — for it is evening — on the bosoms of the 
dead. Yoho, past streams, in which the cattle 
cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; 
past paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past 
last year's stacks, cut, slice by slice, away, and 
showing, in the waning light, like ruined gables, 
old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and 
through the merry water-splash, and up at a 
canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho! 



Yoho, among the gathering shades; making 
of no account the deep reflections of the trees 
but scampering on through light and darkness, 
44 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

all the same, as if the light of London fifty miles 
away, were quite enough to travel by, and some 
to spare. Yoho, beside the village-green, where 
cricket-players linger yet, and every little inden- 
tation made in the fresh grass by bat or wicket, 
ball or player's foot, sheds out its perfume on 
the night. Away with four fresh horses from 
the Baldfaced Stag, where topers congregate 
about the door admiring; and the last team 
with traces hanging loose, go roaming off to- 
ward the pond, until observed and shouted after 
by a dozen throats, while volunteering boys 
pursue them. Now, with a clattering of hoofs 
and striking out of fiery sparks, across the old 
stone bridge, and down again into the shadowv 
road, and through the open gate, and far away, 
away, into the wold. Yoho! 

Yoho, behind there, stop that bugle for a 
moment! Come creeping over to the front, along 
the coach-roof, guard, and make one of this 
basket! Not that we slacken in our pace the 
while, not we: we rather put the bits of blood 
upon their mettle, for the greater glory of the 

45 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

snack. Ah! It is long since this bottle of old 
wine was brought into contact with the mellow 
breath of night, you may depend, and rare good 
stuff it is to wet a bugle's whistle with. Only 
try it. Don't be afraid of turning up your finger, 
Bill, another pull! Now take your breath, and 
try the bugle, Bill. There's music! There's a 
tone! "Over the hills and far away," indeed. 
Yoho! The skittish mare is all alive to-night. 
Yoho! Yoho! 

See the bright moon! High up before we 
know it; making the earth reflect the objects 
on its breast like water. Hedges, trees, low 
cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps and 
flourishing young slips, have all grown vain upon 
the sudden, and mean to contemplate their own 
fair images till morning. The poplars yonder 
rustle, that their quivering leaves may see them- 
selves upon the ground. Not so the oak; 
trembling does not become him ; and he watches 
himself in his stout old burly steadfastness, 
without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown 
gate, ill-poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled 
4 6 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

and decayed, swings to and fro before its glass, 
like some fantastic dowager; while our own 
ghostly likeness travels on, Yoho! Yoho! 
through ditch and brake, upon the ploughed land 
and the smooth, along the steep hill-side and 
steeper wall, as if it were a phantom-hunter. 

Clouds too! And a mist upon the hollow! 
Not a dull fog that hides it, but a light airy 
gauze-like mist, which in our eyes of modest 
admiration gives a new charm to the beauties 
it is spread before: as real gauze has done ere 
now, and would again, so please you, though 
we were the pope. Yoho! Why, now we travel 
like the moon herself. Hiding this minute in a 
grove of trees; next minute in a patch of vapor; 
emerging now upon our broad clear course; 
withdrawing now, but always dashing on, our 
journey is a counterpart of hers. Yoho! A 
match against the moon! 

The beauty of the night is hardly felt, when 
day comes leaping up. Yoho! Two stages, 
and the country roads are almost changed to a 
continuous street. Yoho, past market-gardens, 

47 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Ride on an English Coach Through an English Country 

rows of houses, villas, crescents, terraces, and 
squares; past wagons, coaches, carts; past early 
workmen, late stragglers, drunken men, and 
sober carriers of loads; past brick and mortar 
in its every shape; and in among the rattling 
pavements, where a jaunty seat upon a coach is 
not so easy to preserve! Yoho, down countless 
turnings, and through countless mazy ways, 
until an old inn-yard is gained, and Tom Pinch, 
getting down, quite stunned and giddy, is in 
London! Martin Ckuzzlewit. 

A Landlady of an Old English Inn 

npHIS mistress of the Blue Dragon was, in out- 
ward appearance, just what a landlady 
should be; broad, buxom, comfortable, and 
good-looking, with a face of clear red and white, 
which, by its jovial aspect, at once bore testi- 
mony to her hearty participation in the good 
things of the larder and cellar, and to their 
thriving and healthful influences. She was a 
widow, but years ago had passed through her 

4 8 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Landlady of an Old English Inn 

state of weeds, and burst into flower again; and 
in full bloom she had continued ever since; and 
in full bloom she was now; with roses on her 
ample skirts, and roses on her bodice, roses in 
her cap, roses on her cheeks — ay, and roses 
worth the gathering too, on her lips, for that 
matter. She had still a bright black eye, and 
jet-black hair; was comely, dimpled, plump, 
and tight as a gooseberry; and though she was 
not exactly what the world calls young, you may 
make an affidavit, on trust, before any mayor or 
magistrate in Christendom, that there are a 
great many young ladies in the world (blessings 
on them, one and all!) whom you wouldn't like 
half as well, or admire half as much, as the 
beaming hostess of the Blue Dragon. 

Martin Cbnzzlewit. 

The Effect of the Ideal World on the Real 

\X^ERE you all in Switzerland ? I don't be- 
lieve I ever was. It is such a dream 
now. I wonder sometimes whether I ever dis- 

49 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



The Effect of the Ideal World on the Real 

puted with Haldimand; whether I ever drank 
mulled wine on the top of the Great St. Ber- 
nard, or was jovial at the bottom with company 
that have stolen into my affection; whether I 
ever was merry and happy in that valley on the 
Lake of Geneva, or saw you one evening (when 
I didn't know you) walking down among the 
green trees outside Elysee, arm-in-arm with a 
gentleman in a white hat. *I am quite clear 
that there is no foundation for these visions. 
But I should like to go somewhere, too, and try 
it all over again. I don't know how it is, but 
the ideal world in which my lot is cast has an 
odd effect on the real one, and makes it chiefly 
precious for such remembrances. I get quite 
melancholy over them sometimes, especially 
when, as now, those great piled-up semicircles 
of bright faces, at which I have lately been look- 
ing — all laughing, earnest and intent — have 
faded away like dead people. They seem a 
ghostly moral of everything in life to me. 

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Watson. 

July 27, 1848. 
5° 



T HE WISDOM OF DICK E N S 
Christmas Day in the Victorian Days 

T^OR the people who were shovelling away on 
the house-tops were jovial and full of glee; 
calling out to one another from the parapets, 
and now and then exchanging a facetious snow- 
ball — better-natured missile far than many a 
wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right 
and not less heartily if it went wrong, The 
poulterers' shops were still half open, and the 
fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There 
were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chest- 
nuts, shaped like the waistcoats oi jolly old 
gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling 
out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. 
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed 
Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their 
growth like Spanish friars, and winking from 
their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as 
they went bv, and glanced demurely at the 
hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and 
apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids, 
there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shop- 
keepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicu- 
ous hooks, that people's mouths might water 

S 1 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Christmas Day in the Victorian Days 

gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, 
mossy and brown, recalling in their fragrance 
ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant 
shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; 
there were Norfolk biffins, squat and swarthy, 
setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, 
and, in the great compactness of their juicy per- 
sons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be 
carried home in paper bags and eaten after 
dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth 
among these choice fruits in a bowl, though 
members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, 
appeared to know that there was something 
going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round 
and round their little world in slow and passion- 
less excitement. 

The Grocers! oh, the Grocers! nearly closed, 
with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but 
through those gaps such glimpses! It was not 
alone that the scales descending on the counter 
made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller 
parted company so briskly, or that the canisters 
were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, 
52 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Christmas Day in the Victorian Days 

or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee 
were so grateful to the nose, or even that the 
raisins were so plentiful and pure, the almonds 
so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so 
long and straight, the other spices so delicious, 
the candied fruits so caked and spotted with 
molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on 
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was 
it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the 
French plums blushed in modest tartness from 
their highly decorated boxes, or that everything 
was good to eat, and in its Christmas dress; but 
the customers were all so hurried and so eager 
in the hopeful promise of the day, that they 
tumbled up against each other at the door, 
crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and 4eft 
their purchases upon the counter and came 
running back to fetch them, and committed 
hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best 
humour possible; while the grocer and his 
people were so frank and fresh that the polished 
hearts with which they fastened their aprons 
behind, might have been their own, worn out- 
53 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Christmas Day in the Victorian Days 

side for general inspection, and for Christmas 
daws to peck at if they chose, 

But soon the steeples called good people all, 
to Church and chapel, and away they came, 
flocking through the streets in their best clothes, 
and with their gayest faces. At the same time 
there emerged from scores of by-streets, lanes, 
and nameless turnings, innumerable people, 
carrying their dinners to the bakers' shops. 
The sight of these poor travellers appeared to 
interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with 
Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and 
taking off the covers as their bearers passed, 
sprinkled incense on their dinners from his 
torch. And it was a very uncommon kind of 
torch, for once or twice when there were angry 
words between some dinner-carriers who had 
jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water 
on them for it, and their good humour was 
restored directly. For they said it was a shame 
to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it 
was! God love it, so it was! 

A Christmas Carol. 
54 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Christmas and Its Season 

A ND numerous indeed are the hearts to which 
Christmas brings a brief season of happi- 
ness and enjoyment. How many families whose 
members have been dispersed far and wide, in 
the restless struggles of life, are then re-united, 
and meet once again in that happy state of com- 
panionship and mutual good-will, which is a 
source of such pure and unalloyed delight, and 
one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows 
of the world, that the religious beliefs of the 
most civilized nations, and the rude traditions 
of the roughest savages, alike number it among 
the first joys of a future state of existence, pro- 
vided for the blest and happy! How many old 
recollections, and how many dormant sympa- 
thies, does Christmas time awaken! 

We write these words now, many miles dis- 
tant from the spot at which, year after year, we 
met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. 
Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, 
have ceased to beat; many of the looks that 
shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; 
the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the 

55 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Christmas and Its Season 

eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; 
and yet the old house, the room, the merry 
voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the 
most minute and trivial circumstance connected 
with these happy meetings, crowd upon our 
mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the 
last assemblage had been but yesterday. Happy, 
happy Christmas, that can win us back to the 
delusions of our childish days, that can recall to 
the old man the pleasures of his youth, and 
transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands 
of miles away, back to his own fireside and his 
quiet home! Pickwick Papers. 

English Hospitality 

/^OMEto England! Come to England! Our 
oysters are small, I know; they are said 
by Americans to be coppery; but our hearts are 
of the largest size. We are thought to excel in 
shrimps, to be far from despicable in point of 
lobsters, and in periwinkles are considered to 
challenge the universe. Our oysters, small 
56 



ill E W LSDOM OF DICKENS 
English Hospitality 

though they be, are not devoid of the refreshing 
influence which that species o( fish is supposed 

to exercise in these latitudes. 

Letter to Prof. Feltott, 
March 14, 1S42. 



An Enchanted Mint Julep 
VTOUR reference to my dear friend Washing- 

ton Irving renews the vivid impressions 

reawakened in my mind at Baltimore the other 

day. I saw his fine face for the last time in 
that city. He came there from New 1 oik to 

pass a day or two with me before I went west- 
ward, and they were made among the most 
memorable oi' my life In' his delightful fancy 
and genial humour. Some unknown admirer 
o\ his hooks and mine sent to the hotel a most 
enormous mint julep, wreathed with flowers. 
We sat, one on either side o( it, with great so- 
lemnity, hut the solemnity was o( very short 
duration. It was quite an enchanted julep, and 
carried us among innumerable people and 

57 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
An Enchanted Mint Julep 

places that we both knew. The julep held out 
far into the night, and my memory never saw 
him afterward otherwise than as bending over 
it, with his straw, with an attempted gravity 
(after some anecdote, involving some wonder- 
fully droll and delicate observation of charac- 
ter), and then, as his eyes caught mine, melting 
into that captivating laugh of his which was the 
brightest and best I have ever heard. 

Letter to Mr. Charles Lanman. 



58 



rill WISDOM OF PICKENS 



SOCIETY 



I ii I. wi SDOM 01 \>\< K1 



'I Ik- I niverial [nititution 



44]VyTY fiend Magsman, I'll imparl to you a 

discovery I've made. It's available; 

it's cost twelve thousand live hundred pound; 
it may do yoii good in life. The secret of tins 

mattei is, that it ain't so much thai a person 

goes into Society, as that Society goes into a 

person." 

Not exactly keeping up with his uieamn', I 
shook my head, put on a deep look, and said, 

"You're right there, Mr. Chops/ 1 "Mags- 
man/* he says, twitching me by the leg, "Society 
has gone into me, to the tune of every penny of 
my property/ 5 . . . 

"Society, taken in the lump, is all dwarfs. 
At the court of St. James's, they was all a doing 

my old business all a goin 1 three times round 

the Cairawan, in the hold COUrt-SuitS and prop- 
erties. Elsewheres, they was most <>l 'em ringin' 
their little bells out of make-believes, hvery- 
wheres, the sarser was a goin' round. MagS- 
man, the sarser is the uniwersal Institution." . . 
" As to Fat I ,adies," says he, giving his head a 
tremendous one agin the wall, "there's lots of 

60 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Universal Institution 

them in Society, and worse than the original. 
Hers was a outrage upon Taste — simply a out- 
rage upon Taste — awakenin' contempt — carryin' 
its own punishment in the form of a Indian!" 
Here he giv himself a tremendious one. "But 
theirs, Magsman, theirs is mercenary outrages. 
Lay in Cashmeer shawls, buy bracelets, strew 
'em and a lot of 'andsome fans and things about 
your rooms, let it be known that you give away 
like water to all as come to admire, and the Fat 
Ladies that don't exhibit for so much down upon 
the drum, will come from all the pints of the 
compass to flock about you, whatever you are. 
They'll drill holes in your 'art, Magsman, like 
a Cullender. And when you've no more left to 
give, they'll laugh at you to your face, and leave 
you to have your bones picked dry by Wulturs, 
like the dead Wild Ass of the Prairies that you 
deserve to be!" Here he giv himself the most 
tremendious one of all, and dropped. . . . 

"Magsman! — the difference is this. When I 
was out of Society, I was paid light for being 
seen. When I went into Society, I paid heavy 

61 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Universal Institution 

for being seen. I prefer the former, even if I 
wasn't forced upon it. Give me out through 
the trumpet, in the hold way, to-morrow. " 

A House To Let. 

Brewing and Gentility 

T DON'T know why it should be a crack thing 
to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that 
while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, 
you may be as genteel as never was and brew; 
... a gentleman may not keep a public-house, 
but a public-house may keep a gentleman. 

Great Expectations. 

The World of Fashion 

fT is not a large world. Relatively even to 
this world of ours, which has its limits too 
(as your highness shall find when you have 
made the tour of it, and are come to the brink 
of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. 
There is much good in it; there are many good 

62 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The World of Fashion 

and true people in it; it has its appointed place. 
But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped 
up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, 
and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, 
and cannot see them as they circle round the 
sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is 
sometimes unhealthy for want of air. 

Bleak House. 

Podsnappery 



M 



R. PODSNAP settled that whatever he 
put behind him he put out of existence. 
There was a dignified conclusiveness — not to 
add a grand convenience — in this way of getting 
rid of disagreeables, which had done much 
toward establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty 
place in Mr. Podsnap's satisfaction. "I don't 
want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss 
it; I don't admit it!" Mr. Podsnap had even 
acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in 
often clearing the world of its most difficult 
problems, by sweeping them behind him (and 

63 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



Pod; 



ippery 



consequently sheer away) with those words and 
a flushed face. For they affronted him. 

Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large 
world, morally; no, nor even geographically: 
seeing that although his business was sustained 
upon commerce with other countries, he con- 
sidered other countries, with that impor- 
tant reservation, a mistake, and of their man- 
ners and customs would conclusively observe, 
"Not English !" when, Presto! with a flourish 
of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were 
swept away. Elsewise, the world got up at 
eight, shaved close at a quarter past, break- 
fasted at nine, went to the city at ten, came home 
at half-past five, and dined at seven. Mr. 
Podsnap's notions of the arts in their integrity 
might have been stated thus; Literature; 
large print respectively descriptive of getting 
up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, 
breakfasting at nine, going to the city at ten, 
coming home at half-past five, and dining at 
seven. Painting and sculpture*, models and 
portraits representing professors of getting up 

64 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Podsnappery 

at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, break- 
fasting at nine, going to the city at ten, coming 
home at half-past five, and dining at seven. 
Music; a respectable performance (without 
variations) on stringed and wind instruments, 
sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shav- 
ing close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, 
going to the city at ten, coming home at half- 
past five, and dining at seven. Nothing else to 
be permitted to those same vagrants the arts, 
on pain of excommunication. Nothing else to 
be — anywhere ! 

As so eminently respectable a man, Mr. 
Podsnap was sensible of its being required of 
him to take Providence under his protection. 
Consequently he always knew exactly what 
Providence meant. Inferior and less respec- 
table men might fall short of that mark, but 
Mr. Podsnap was always up to it. And it was 
very remarkable (and must have been very 
comfortable) that what Providence meant, was 
invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant. 

Our Mutual Friend, 

65 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Evils of Riches 

TELL you, man, . . . that I have gone a rich 
man, among people of all grades and kinds; 
relatives, friends, and strangers; among people 
in whom, when I was poor, I had confidence, 
and justly, for they never once deceived me then, 
or, to me, wronged each other. But I have never 
found one nature, no, not one, in which, being 
wealthy and alone, I was not forced to detect 
the latent corruption that lay hid within it, 
waiting for such as I to bring it forth. Treach- 
ery, deceit, and low design; hatred of com- 
petitors, real or fancied, for my favour; meanness, 
falsehood, baseness, and servility; or, an as- 
sumption of honest independence, almost worse 
than all; these are the beauties which my wealth 
has brought to light. Brother against brother, 
child against parent, friends treading on the 
faces of friends, this is the social company by 
whom my way has been attended. There are 
stories told — they may be true or false — of rich 
men, who, in the garb of poverty, have found 
out virtue and rewarded it. They were dolts 
and idiots for their pains. They should have 

66 



T II E W 1SDO M OF DICKENS 
The Evils of Riches 

made the search in their own characters. They 
should have shown themselves fit objects to he 
robbed and preyed upon and plotted against 
and adulated by any knaves, who, but for joy, 
would have spat upon their coffins when they 
died their dupes; and then their search would 
have ended as mine has done, and they would 
be what I am. Martin Cbnzzlewit. 

Manners and the Gentleman 

^^O man who was not a true gentleman at 
heart, ever was, since the world began, a 
true gentleman in manner. . . . No varnish can 
hide the grain of the wood; the more varnish 
you put on, the more the grain will express 
itself. Great Expectations. 

Human Aid 

TF man would help some of us a little more, 
God would forgive us all the sooner, per- 
haps. Dombey and Son. 

67 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Newly Rich 

*TPHERE'S a surprisin' number of men, sir, 
who as long as they've only got their own 
shoes and stockings to depend upon, will walk 
down-hill, along the gutters quiet enough, and 
by themselves, and do not do much harm. 
But set any on 'em up with a coach and horses, 
sir, and it's wonderful what a knowledge of 
drivin' he'll show, and how he'll fill his wehicle 
with passengers and start off in the middle of 
the road, neck or nothing, to the devil 1 

Martin Chuzzlewit. 

Injustice and the Innocent 

nPHE world being in the same constant com- 
mission of vast quantities of injustice, is 
a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea 
that if the victim of its falsehood and malice 
have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be 
sustained under his trials, and somehow or 
other to come right at last; "in which case," 
say they who have hunted him down, " — though 
we certainly don't expect it — nobody will be 

68 



THE WISDOM O F DICK E N S 
Injustice and the Innocent 

better pleased than we." Whereas, the world 
would do well to reflect, that injustice is in 
itself, to every generous and properly consti- 
tuted mind, an injury, of all others the most in- 
sufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard 
to bear; and that many clear consciences have 
gone to their account elsewhere, and many 
sound hearts have broken, because of this very 
reason; the knowledge of their own deserts 
only aggravating their sufferings, and render- 
ing them the less endurable. 

The Old Curiosity Shop. 

Reputations Made by Fuss 



"VTOW the point of view seized by the be- 
witching Tippins, that this same working 
and rallying round is to keep up appearances, 
may have something in it, but not all the truth. 
More is done, or considered to be done — which 
does as well — by taking cabs, and "going about," 
than the fair Tippins knew of. Many vast 
vague reputations nave been made, solely by 

69 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Reputations Made by Fuss 

taking cabs and going about. This particu- 
larly obtains in all parliamentary affairs. 
Whether the business in hand be to get a 
man in, or get a man out, or get a man over, or 
promote a railway, or jockey a railway, or 
what else, nothing is understood to be so effec- 
tual as scouring nowhere in a violent hurry — 
in short, as taking cabs and going about. 

Our Mutual Friend. 

A Prison for Debtors 

HpHIRTY years ago, there stood, a few doors 
short of the church of Saint George, in 
the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand 
side of the way going southward, the Marshalsea 
Prison. It had stood there many years before, 
and it remained there some years afterward; 
but it is gone now, and the world is none the 
worse without it. 

It was an oblong pile of barrack buildings, 
partitioned into squalid houses standing back 
to back, so that there were no back rooms; 

7° 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Prison for Debtors 

environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in 
by high walls duly spiked at top. [tself a close 
and confined prison for debtors, it contained 
within it a much closer and more confined jail 
for smugglers. Offenders against the revenue 
laws, and defaulters to excise or customs, who 
had incurred fines which the}' were unable to 
pay, were supposed to be incarcerated behind an 
iron-plated door, closing up a second prison, 
consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind 
alley some yard and a half wide, which formed 
the mysterious termination of the very limited 
skittle-ground in which the Marshalsea debtors 
bowled down their troubles. 

Supposed to be incarcerated there, because 
the time had rather outgrown the strong cells 
and the blind alley. In practice they had come 
to be considered a little too bad, though in 
theory they were quite as good as ever; which 
may be observed to be the case at the present 
day with other cells that are not at all strong, 
and with other blind alleys that are stone-blind. 
Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Prison for Debtors 

the debtors (who received them with open arms), 
except at certain constitutional moments when 
somebody came from some office to go through 
some form of overlooking something, which 
neither he nor anybody else knew anything 
about. On those truly British occasions, the 
smugglers, if any, made a feint of walking into 
strong cells and the blind alley, while this some- 
body pretended to do his something; and made 
a reality of walking out again as soon as he 
hadn't done it — neatly epitomizing the admin- 
istration of most of the public affairs, on our 
right little, tight little island. Little Dorrit. 

The High Court of Chancery of England 

A ND hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn 
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the 
lord high chancellor in his high court of chan- 
cery. 

Never can there come fog too thick, never 
can there come mud and mire too deep, to 
assort with the groping and floundering con- 

7^ 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The High Court of Chancery of England 

dition which this high court of chancery, most 
pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the 
sight of heaven and earth. 

On such an afternoon, if ever, the lord high 
chancellor ought to be sitting here — as here he 
is — with a foggy glory round his head, softly 
fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, 
addressed by a large advocate with great whis- 
kers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, 
and outwardly directing his contemplation to 
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing 
but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of 
members of the high court of chancery bar 
ought to be — as here they are — mistily engaged 
in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless 
cause, tripping one another upon slippery pre- 
cedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, 
running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded 
heads against wads of words, and making a 
pretence of equity with serious faces, as players 
might. On such an afternoon, the various 
solicitors in the cause, some two or three of 
whom have inherited it from their fathers, who 

73 



THE WISDOM OF DICK EN S 
The High Court of Chancery of England 



made a fortune by it, ought to be — as are they 
not ? — ranged in a line, in a long matted well 
(but you might look in vain for truth at the 
bottom of it), between the registrar's red table 
and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, an- 
swers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, 
references to masters, masters' reports, moun- 
tains of costly nonsense, piled before them. 
Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles 
here and there; well may the fog hang heavy 
in it, as if it would never get out; well may the 
stained-glass windows lose their colour, and 
admit no light of day into the place, well may the 
uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through 
the glass panes in the door, be deterred from 
entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl 
languidly echoing to the roof from the padded 
dais where the lord high chancellor looks into 
the lantern that has no light in it, and where the 
attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! 
This is the court of chancery; which has its 
decaying houses and its blighted lands in every 
shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every 

74 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The High Court of Chancery of England 

mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; 
which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod 
heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and beg- 
ging through the round of even* man's acquaint- 
ance; which gives to moneyed might, the means 
abundantly of weaning out the right; which 
so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; 
so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; 
that there is not an honourable man among its 
practitioners who would not give — who does 
not often give — the warning, " Suffer any wrong 
that can be done vou, rather than come here!" 

Bleak House* 

The Poor People 

I" DON'T know what we poor people are coming 
to. Lord send we may be coming to some- 
thing better in the New Year nigh upon us! 
... It seems as if we can't go right, or do 
right, or be righted. I hadn't much schooling 
myself when I was young; and I can't make 
out whether we have any business on the face 

75 



TH E Wl S DOM OF 1 CKEN S 

I ho Foot People 



of* the earth, oi not. Sometimes I think we 
must have a little; and sometimes I think we 
must be intruding. I get so puzzled sometimes 
that I am not even able to make up my mind 
whether there is any good at all in us, or whether 
we are born had. We seem to he dreadful 
things; we seem to give a deal oi trouble; we 
are always being complained of and guarded 
against. One w av or other we fill the papers. 
Talk of a New \ ear! I can bear up as well as 
another man at most times; better than a gcn>il 
many, tor I am as strong as a lion, and all men 
a'nt; but supposing it should really be that we 
have no right to a New Year supposing we 
really art intruding — The Chimes* 

The Best Intentions of the Pool 

WtlLJOW 'tis, ma'am, that what is best in us 
fo'k, seems to turn us most to trouble 
an' misfbltun' an' mistake, I dunno. But 'tis 
so. 1 know 'tis, as I know the heavens is over 
me ahint the smoke." Hard Times. 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Poor and Home 

A ND let me linger in this place, for an instant, 
to remark that if ever household affections 
and loves are graceful things, they are graceful 
in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy 
and the proud to home may be forged on earth, 
but those which link the poor man to his humble 
hearth are of the truer metal, and bear the stamp 
of Heaven. The man of high descent may love 
the halls and lands of his inheritance as a part 
of himself: as trophies of his birth and power; 
his associations with them are associations of 
pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's 
attachment to the tenements he holds, which 
strangers have held before, and may to-morrow 
occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep 
into a purer soil. His household gods are of 
flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or 
precious stone; he has no property but in the 
affections of his own heart; and when they 
endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and 
toil and scanty fare, that man has his love of 
home from God, and his rude hut becomes a 
solemn place. 

77 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Poor and Home 

Oh! if those who rule the destinies of na- 
tions would but remember this — if they would 
but think how hard it is for the very poor to 
have engendered in their hearts that love of 
home from which all domestic virtues spring, 
when they live in dense and squalid masses 
where social decency is lost, or rather never 
found — if they would but turn aside from the 
wide thoroughfares and great houses, and strive 
to improve the wretched dwellings in by-ways 
where only Poverty may walk — many low roofs 
would point more truly to the sky than the 
loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from 
the midst of guilt and crime, and horrible dis- 
ease, to mock them by its contrast. In hollow 
voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and Jail, this 
truth is preached from day to day, and has 
been proclaimed for years. It is no light 
matter — no outcry from the working vulgar — 
no mere question of the people's health and 
comforts that may be whistled down on Wed- 
nesday nights. In love of home, the love of 
country has its rise; and who are the truer 

78 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Poor and Homo 

patriots or the better in time of need — those 
who venerate the land, owning its wood, and 
stream, and earth, and all that they produce : 
or those who love their country, boasting not a 
foot of ground in all its wide domain! 

The Old Curiosity Shop. 

Between the Devil and the Deep Sea 

U"DATTLED0RE and shuttlecock's a very 

good game, when you a nt the shuttle- 
cock, and two Lawyers the battledores, in vieh 
case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant." 

Pickwick Papers* 

The Labourer and His Struggle tor Rights 

CtVX/'HA IV repeated Mr. Bounderbv, folding 
his arms, "do you people, in a general 
way, complain o\ :" 

Stephen looked at him with some little irreso- 
lution for a moment, and then seemed to make 
up his mind. 

n 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Labourer and His Struggle tor Rights 

"Sir, 1 were never good at showin' o't, though 
I ha' had'n mv share in feeling o't. 'Deed we 
are in a muddle, sir. Look round town — so 
rich as 'tis — and see tlv numbers o' people as 
has been broughten into bein' heer, fur to 
weave, an' to card, an' to piece out a livin', aw 
the same one way, somehows, 'twixt their 
cradles an' their graves. Look how we live, 
an' wheer we live, an' in what numbers, an' by 
what chances, an' wi' what sameness; and look 
how the mills is awlus a goin', an' how they never 
works us no nigher to onny dis'ant object — 
'ceptin' awlus, death. Look how you considers 
of us, an' writes of us, an' talks oi" us, an' goes 
up wi' vo'r deputations to secretaries o' state 
'bout us, an' how vo' are awlus right, and how 
we are awlus wrong, and never had'n no reason 
in us sin'ever we were born. Look how this ha' 
growen an' growen, sir, bigger an' bigger, 
broader an' broader, harder an' harder, fro' 
year to year, fro' generation unto generation. 
Who can look on't, sir, and lairly tell a man 'tis 
not a muddle ;" 

80 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Labourer and His Struggle tor Rights 

"Of course," said Mr. Bounderbv. "Now 
perhaps you'll let the gentleman know how you 
would set this muddle (as you're so fond of 
calling it) to rights. " 

"I dunno, sir. I canna be expecten to't. 
'Tis not me as should be looken to for that, sir. 
'Tis them as is put ower me, and ower aw the 
rest of us. What do they tak' upon themsen, 
sir, if not to do't ?" 

"I'll tell you something toward it, at any 
rate," returned Mr. Bounderbv. "We will 
make an example of half a dozen Slackbridges. 
We'll indict the blackguards for felony, and get 
'em shipped oft' to penal settlements." 

Stephen gravely shook his head. 

"Don't tell me we won't, man," said Mr. 
Bounderbv, by this time blowing a hurricane, 
"because we will, I tell you!" 

"Sir," returned Stephen, with the quiet con- 
fidence of absolute certainty, "if you was t' tak' 
a hundred Slackbridges — aw as there is, an' aw 
the number ten times towd — an' was t' sew 'em 
up in separate sacks, an' sink 'em in the deepest 

81 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Labourer and His Struggle for Rights 

ocean as were made ere ever dry land coom to 
be, yo'd leave the muddle just wheer 'tis. Mis- 
cheevous strangers ?''said Stephen with an anx- 
ious smile; "when ha' we not heern, I am sure 
sin* we can call to mind, o' th' mischeevous 
strangers! 'Tis not by them the trouble's made, 
sir. 'Tis not wi' them 't commences. I ha' no 
favor for 'em — I ha'no reason to favor 'em — but 
'tis hopeless and useless to dream o' takin' them 
fro' their trade, 'stead o' takin' their trade fro' 
them! Aw that's now about me in this room 
were heer afore I coom, an' will be here when 
I am gone. Put that clock aboard a ship and 
pack it off to Norfolk Island, an' the time will 
go on just the same. So 'tis w T i' Slackbridge, 
every bit." . . . 

"Sir, I canna, wi' my little learning an' my 
common way, tell the genelman what will 
better aw this — though some workingmen of this 
town could, above my powers — but I can tell 
him what I know will never do't. The strong 
hand will never do't. Vict'ry and triumph will 
never do't. Agreein' fur to mak' one side un- 
82 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Labourer and His Struggle for Rights 

nat'rally awlus and forever right, and t'oother 
side unnaturally awlus and forever wrong, will 
never, never do't. Nor yet letting alone will 
never do't. Let thousands upon thousands 
alone, aw leadin' the like lives and aw faw'en 
into the like muddle, and they will be as one, 
an' yo' will be as another wi' a black unpassable 
world betwixt yo', just as long or short a time 
as sitch like misery can last. Not drawin' nigh 
to fo'k, wi' kindness an' patience an' cheery 
ways, that so draws nigh to one another in their 
monny troubles, and so cherishes one another 
in their distresses wi' what they need themseln — 
like, I humbly believe, as no people the gentle- 
man ha' seen in aw his travels can beat — will 
never do't till th' sun turns t'ice. Last o' aw, 
ratin' 'em as so much power, and reg'latin' 'em 
as if they was figures in a soom, or machines: 
wi'out loves and likin's, wi'out memories and 
inclinations, wi'out souls to weary an' souls to 
hope— when aw goes quiet, draggin' on wi' 'em 
as if they'd now't o' th' kind, and when aw goes 
on quiet, reproachin' 'em fur their want o' sitch 

»3 



THE WISDO M OF DICKENS 
The Labourer and His Struggle for Rights 

humanity feelin's in their dealin's wi' ye — this 
will never do't, sir, till God's work is onmade. ,, 

Hard Times. 



A London Slum — The Poor and Their Revenge 

r\ARKNESS rests upon Tom-all-Alone's. 
Dilating and dilating since the sun went 
down last night, it has swelled until it fills every 
void in the place. For a time there were some 
dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of life 
burns in Tom-all-Alone's, heavily, heavily, in 
the nauseous air, and winking — as that lamp, 
too, winks in Tom-all-Alone's — at many hor- 
rible things. But they are blotted out. The 
moon has eyed Tom with a dull, cold stare, as 
admitting some puny emulation of herself in his 
desert region unfit for life and blasted by vol- 
canic fires; but she has passed on, and is gone. 
The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables 
grazes on Tom-all-Alone's, and Tom is fast 
asleep. 

Much mighty speech-making there has been, 
84 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

A London Slum — The Poor and Their Revenge 

both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, 
and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall 
be got right. Whether he shall be put into the 
main road by constables, or by beadles, or by 
bell-ringing, or by force of fingers, or by correct 
principles of taste, or by high church, or by low 
church, or by no church; whether he shall be 
set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with 
the crooked knife of his mind, or whether he 
shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the 
midst of which dust and noise there is but one 
thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may 
and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed accord- 
ing to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. 
And in the hopeful mean time, Tom goes to per- 
dition head foremost in his old determined spirit. 
But he has his revenge. Even the winds are 
his messengers, and they serve him in these 
hours of darkness. There is not a drop of 
Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection 
and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, 
this very night, the choice stream (in which 
chemists on analysis would find the genuine 

85 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A London Slum — The Poor and Their Revenge 

nobility) of a Norman house, and his grace 
shall not be able to say nay to the infamous 
alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's 
slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas 
in which he lives, not one obscenity of degrada- 
tion about him, not an ignorance, not a wicked- 
ness, not a brutality of his committing, but 
shall work its retribution, through every order 
of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and 
to the highest of the high. Verily, what with 
tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has 
his revenge. Bleak House. 

Government by Means of the Circumlocution Office 

' 1 4 HE circumlocution office was (as everybody 
knows without being told) the most im- 
portant department under government. No pub- 
lic business of any kind could possibly be done, 
at any time, without the acquiescence of the cir- 
cumlocution office. Its ringer was in the largest 
public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It 
was equally impossible to do the plainest right 

86 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Government by Means of the Circumlocution Office 

and to undo the plainest wrong, without the ex- 
press authority of the circumlocution office. If 
another gunpowder plot had been discovered 
half an hour before the lighting of the match, 
nobody would have been justified in saving the 
parliament until there had been half a score of 
boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks 
of official memoranda, and a family-vault full 
of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part 
of the circumlocution office. 

This glorious establishment had been early 
in the field, when the one sublime principle in- 
volving the difficult art of governing a country, 
was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It 
had been foremost to study that bright revela- 
tion, and to carry its shining influence through 
the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever 
was required to be done, the circumlocution office 
was beforehand with all the public departments 
in the art of perceiving — how not to do it. 

Through this delicate perception, through the 
tact with which it invariably seized it, and 
through the genius with which it always acted 

87 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Government by Means of the Circumlocution Office 

on it, the circumlocution office had risen to 
overtop all the public departments; and the 
public condition had risen to be — what it was. 
It is true that how not to do it was the great 
study and object of all public departments and 
professional politicians all round the circumlo- 
cution office. It is true that every new premier 
and every new government, coming in be- 
cause they had upheld a certain thing as neces- 
sary to be done, were no sooner come in than 
they applied their utmost faculties to discover- 
ing how not to do it. It is true that from the 
moment when a general election was over, 
every returned man who had been raving on 
hustings because it hadn't been done, and who 
had been asking the friends of the honourable 
gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of 
impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been 
done, and who had been asserting that it must 
be done, and who had been pledging himself 
that it should be done, began to devise how it 
was not to be done. It is true that the debates 
of both houses of parliament the whole session 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Government by Means of the Circumlocution Office 

through, uniformly tended to the protracted 
deliberation, how not to do it. It is true that 
the royal speech at the opening of such session 
virtually said, my lords and gentlemen, you 
have a considerable stroke of work to do, and 
you will please to retire to your respective cham- 
bers, and discuss, how not to do it. It is true 
that the royal speech, at the close of such ses- 
sion, virtually said, my lords and gentlemen, 
you have through several laborious months been 
considering with great loyalty and patriotism, 
how not to do it, and you have found out; and 
with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest 
(natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All 
this was true, but the circumlocution office 
went beyond it. 

Because the circumlocution office went on 
mechanically, every day, keeping this wonder- 
ful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, how 
not to do it, in motion. Because the circum- 
locution office was down upon any ill-advised 
public servant who was going to do it, or who 
appeared to be bv any surprising accident in 

89 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Government by Means of the Circumlocution Office 



remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and 
a memorandum, and a letter of instructions, 
that extinguished him. It was this spirit of 
natural efficiency in the circumlocution office 
that had gradually led to its having something 
to do with everything. Mechanics, natural phi- 
losophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memo- 
rialists, people with grievances, people who 
wanted to prevent grievances, people who 
wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, 
jobbed people, people who couldn't get re- 
warded for merit, and people who couldn't get 
punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately 
tucked up under the foolscap paper of the cir- 
cumlocution office. Little Dorrit. 

Government Service 

"^'UMBERS of people were lost in the circumlo- 
cution office. Unfortunates with wrongs, 
or with projects for the general welfare (and they 
had better have had wrongs at first, than have 
taken that bitter English recipe for certainly 

90 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Government Service 

getting them), who in slow lapse of time and 
agony had passed safely through other public 
departments; who, according to rule, had been 
bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded 
by the other; got referred at last to the circum- 
locution office, and never reappeared in the 
light of day. Boards sat upon them, secre- 
taries minuted upon them, commissioners gab- 
bled about them, clerks registered, entered, 
checked, and ticked them off, and they melted 
away. In short, all the business of the country 
went through the circumlocution office, except 
the business that never came out of it; and its 
name was legion. 

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the cir- 
cumlocution office. Sometimes, parliamentary 
questions were asked about it, and even par- 
liamentary motions made or threatened about 
it, by demagogues so low and ignorant as to 
hold that the real recipe of government was, 
how to do it. Then would the noble lord, or 
right honourable gentleman, in whose depart- 
ment it was to defend the circumlocution office, 

9i 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Government Service 

put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular 
field-day of the occasion. Then would he come 
down to that house with a slap upon the table. 
and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. 
Then would he be there to tell that honourable 
gentleman that the circumlocution office not 
only was blameless in this matter, but was com- 
mendable in this matter, was extollable to the 
skies in this matter. Then would he be there 
to tell that honourable gentleman, that, although 
the circumlocution office was invariably right, 
and wholly right, it never was so right as in this 
matter. Then would he be there to tell that 
honourable gentleman that it would have been 
more to his honour, more to his credit, more to 
his good taste, more to his good sense, more to 
half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had 
left the circumlocution office alone, and never 
approached this matter. Then would he keep 
one eye upon a coach or crammer from the 
circumlocution office sitting below the bar, and 
smash the honourable gentleman with the cir- 
cumlocution office account of the matter. And 

92 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Government Service 

although one of two things always happened; 
namely, either that the circumlocution office 
had nothing to say and said it, or that it had 
something to say of which the noble lord, or 
right honourable gentleman, blundered one half, 
and forgot the other; the circumlocution office 
was always voted immaculate by an accommo- 
dating majority. 

Such a nursery of statesmen had the depart- 
ment become in virtue of a long career of this 
nature, that several solemn lords had attained 
the reputation of being quite unearthly prodi- 
gies of business, solely from having practised, 
how not to do it, at the head of the circumlocu- 
tion office. As to the minor priests and aco- 
lytes of that temple, the result of all this was 
that they stood divided into two classes, and, 
down to the junior messenger, either believed 
in the circumlocution office as a heaven-born 
institution, that had an absolute right to do 
whatever it liked; or took refuge in total in- 
fidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance. 

Little Dorrit. 
93 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



Mrs. Grundy Unconsciously Revealing Herself 

4 4\X7'HAT I want," drawled Mrs. Skewton, 
pinching her shrivelled throat, "is 
heart." It was frightfully true in one sense, if 
not in that in which she used the phrase. 
"What I w T ant is frankness, confidence, less 
conventionality, and freer play of soul. We are 
so dreadfully artificial." Dombey and Son. 

Humanity — Natural and Unnatural 

A LAS! are there so few things in the world 
about us most unnatural, and yet most 
natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or 
judge admonish the unnatural outcast of so- 
ciety; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in 
want of decency, unnatural in losing and con- 
founding all distinctions between good and evil; 
unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, 
in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. 
But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, 
with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, 
goes down into their dens, lying within the 
echoes of our carriage-wheels and daily tread 

9+ 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Humanity — Natural and Unnatural 

upon the pavement stones. Look round upon 
the world of odious sights — millions of immortal 
creatures have no other world on earth — at the 
lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and 
dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops 
her ears, and lisps, "I don't believe it!" 
Breathe the polluted air, foul with every im- 
purity that is poisonous to health and life; and 
have every sense conferred upon our race for 
its delight and happiness, offended, sickened, 
and disgusted, and made a channel by which 
misery and death alone can enter. Vainly 
attempt to think of any simple plant, or flower, 
or wholesome weed, that, set in this fetid bed, 
could have its natural growth, or put its little 
leaves off to the sun as God designed it. And 
then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunt- 
ed form and wicked face, hold forth on its un- 
natural sinfulness, and lament its being so early 
far away from heaven — but think a little of its 
having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell ! 
Those who study the physical sciences, and 
bring them to bear upon the health of man, tell 

95 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Humanity — Natural and Unnatural 

us that if the noxious particles that rise from 
vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should 
see them lowering in a dense black cloud above 
such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the 
better portions of a town. But if the moral pes- 
tilence that rises with them, and in the eternal 
laws of outraged nature, is inseparable from 
them, could be made discernible too, how ter- 
rible the revelation! Then should we see de- 
pravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, 
and a long train of nameless sins against the 
natural affections and repulsions of mankind, 
overhanging the devoted spots, and creeping on, 
to blight the innocent and spread contagion 
among the pure. Then should we see how the 
same poisoned fountains that flow into our hos- 
pitals and lazar-houses, inundate the jails, and 
make the convict-ships swim deep, and roll 
across the seas, and overrun vast continents 
with crime. Then should we stand appalled to 
know T , that where we generate disease to strike 
our children down and entail itself on unborn 
generations, there also we breed, by the same 

9 6 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Humanity — Natural and Unnatural 

certain process, infancy that knows no inno- 
cence, youth without modesty or shame, ma- 
turity that is mature in nothing but in suffering 
and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on 
the form we bear. Unnatural humanity! When 
we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs 
from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring 
up from the offal in the by-ways of our wicked 
cities, and roses bloom in the fat church-yards 
that they cherish; then we may look for natural 
humanity and find it growing from such seed. 

Oh for a good spirit who would take the 
house-tops off", with a more potent and benig- 
nant hand than the lame demon of the tale, and 
show a Christian people what dark shapes issue 
from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of 
the destroying angel as he moves forth among 
them ! For only one night's view of the pale 
phantoms rising from the scenes of our too long 
neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where 
vice and fever propagate together, raining the 
tremendous and social retributions which are ever 
pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright 

97 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Humanity — Natural and Unnatural 

and blest the morning that should rise on such 
a night; for men, delayed no more by stum- 
bling-blocks of their own making, which are but 
specks of dust upon the path between them and 
eternity, would then apply themselves like 
creatures of one common origin, owing one duty 
to the father of one family, and tending to one 
common end to make the world a better place! 
Not the less bright and blessed would that 
day be for rousing some who never have looked 
out upon the world of human life around them, 
to a knowledge of their own relation to it, and 
for making them acquainted with a perversion 
of nature in their own contracted sympathies 
and estimates; as great, and yet as natural in 
its development, when once begun, as the lowest 
degradation known. Dombey and Son. 

Capital Punishment 

1V>TAY it not be well to inquire whether the 
punishment of death be beneficial to so- 
ciety ? I believe it to have a horrible fascination 

9 8 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Capital Punishment 

for many of those persons who render themselves 
liable to it, impelling them onward to the ac- 
quisition of a frightful notoriety. ... I pre- 
sume this to be the case in very badly regulated 
minds, when I observe the strange fascination 
which everything connected with this punish- 
ment, or the object of it, possesses for tens of 
thousands of decent, virtuous, well-conducted 
people, who are quite unable to resist the pub- 
lished portraits, letters, anecdotes, smilings, 
snuff-takings, of the bloodiest and most unnat- 
ural scoundrel with the gallows before him. . . . 
I am disposed to come to the conclusion that it 
produces crime in the criminally disposed, and 
engenders a diseased sympathy — morbid and 
bad, but natural and often irresistible — among 
the well-conducted and gentle. . . . Further- 
more, we know that all exhibitions of agony 
and death have a tendency to brutalize and 
harden the feelings of men, and have always 
been the most rife among the fiercest people. 
Again, it is a great question whether ignorant 
and dissolute persons . . . seeing that murder 

99 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Capital Punishment 

done, and not having seen the other, will not, 
almost of necessity, sympathise with the man 
who dies before them. 

Letter to Mr. Macvey Napier. 

July 28, 1845. 

Letters to Friends Written in Imagination 

^ r OW don't you in your own heart and soul 
quarrel with me for this long silence ? Not 
half so much as I quarrel with myself, I know; 
but if you could read half the letters I write to 
you in imagination, you would swear by me 
for the best of correspondents. The truth is, 
that when I have done my morning's work, 
down goes my pen, and from that minute I feel 
it a positive impossibility to take it up again, 
until imaginary butchers and bakers wave me 
to my desk. I walk about brimful of letters, 
facetious descriptions, touching morsels, and 
pathetic friendships, but can't for the soul of 
me uncork myself. The post-office is my rock 
ahead. My average number of letters that 
100 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Letters to Friends Written in Imagination 

must be written every day is, at the least, a 
dozen. And you could no more know what I 
was writing to you spiritually, from the perusal 
of the bodily thirteenth, than you could tell 
from my hat what was going on in my head, or 
could read my heart on the surface of my flan- 
nel waistcoat. Letter to Prof. F el ton. 

Sept. i, 1843. 

The Apathy of a People to Its Own Welfare 

'T'HERE is nothing in the present time at once 
so galling and so alarming to me as the 
alienation of the people from their own public 
affairs. I have no difficulty in understanding 
it. They have had so little to do with the game 
through all these years of Parliamentary Re- 
form, that they have sullenly laid down their 
cards, and taken to looking on. The players 
who are left at the table do not see beyond it, 
conceive that gain and loss and all the interest 
of the play are in their hands, and will never be 
wiser until they and the table and the lights and 
101 



THE W I S D O M OF DICKENS 

The Apathy of a People to Its Own Welfare 

the money are all overturned together. And I 
believe the discontent to be so much the worse 
for smouldering, instead of blazing openly, that 
it is extremely like the general mind of France 
before the breaking out of the first Revolution, 
and is in danger of being turned by any one of 
a thousand accidents — a bad harvest — the last 
strain too much of aristocratic insolence or in- 
capacity — a defeat abroad — a mere chance at 
home — into such a devil of a conflagration as 
never has been beheld since. Meanwhile, all 
our English tuft-hunting, toad-eating, and other 
manifestations of accursed gentility — to say 
nothing of the Lord knows who's defiances of 
the proven truth before six hundred and fifty 
men — are expressing themselves every day. 
So, every day, the disgusted millions with this 
unnatural gloom are confirmed and hardened 
in the very worst of moods. Finally, round all 
this is an atmosphere of poverty, hunger, and 
ignorant desperation, of the mere existence of 
which perhaps not one man in a thousand of 
those not actually enveloped in it, through the 

I02 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Apathy of a People to Its Own Welfare 

whole extent of this country, has the least idea. 
It seems to me an absolute impossibility, to di- 
rect the spirit of the people at this pass until it 
shows itself. If they began to bestir themselves 
in the vigorous national manner; if the}' would 
appear in political reunion, array themselves 
peacefully but in vast numbers against a sys- 
tem that they know to be rotten altogether, 
make themselves heard like the sea all round 
this island, I for one should be in such a move- 
ment heart and soul, and should think it a duty 
of the plainest kind to go along with it, and try 
to guide it by all possible means. But you can 
no more help a people who do not help them- 
selves than you can help a man who does not 
help himself. And until the people can be got 
up from the lethargy, which is an awful symp- 
tom of the advanced state of their disease, I 
know of nothing that can be done beyond keep- 
ing their wrongs continually before them. 

Letter to Mr. Austin H. La yard. 

April 10, 1850. 



io 3 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
MEN AND WOMEN 



THE WISDOM OF DICK EX S 
A Good Man 

TS what you may call a outard and visible sign 
of a in'ard and spirited grasp, and when 
found make a note of. Dombey and Son. 

The Unco' Guid and the Unco' Rich 

QOKETOWN, in which Messrs. Bounderby 
and Gradgrind now walked, was a tri- 
umph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in 
it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike 
the key-note,]Coketown, before pursuing our tune. 
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that 
would have been red if the smoke and ashes had 
allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town 
of unnatural red and black, like the painted 
face of a savage. It was a town of machinery 
and tall chimneys, out of which interminable 
serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever 
and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a 
black canal in it, and a river that ran purple 
with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings 
full of windows where there was a rattling and 
a trembling all dav long, and where the piston 
105 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Unco' Guid and the Unco' Rich 

of the steam-engine worked monotonously up 
and down, like the head of an elephant in a 
state of melancholy madness. It contained 
several large streets, all very like one another, and 
many small streets still more like one another, 
inhabited by people equally like one another, 
who all went in and out at the same hours, 
with the same sound upon the same pavements, 
to do the same work, and to whom every day was 
the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every 
year the counterpart of the last and the next. 

These attributes of Coketown were in the 
main inseparable from the work by which it 
was sustained; against them were to be set off, 
comforts of life which found their way all over 
the world, and elegancies of life which made, we 
will not ask how much of the fine lady, who 
could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. 
The rest of its features were voluntary, and 
they were these. 

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was 
severely workful. If the members of a relig- 
ious oersuasion built a chapel there — as the 
106 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Unco' Guid and the Unco' Rich 

members of eighteen religious persuasions had 
done — they made it a pious warehouse, of red 
brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly 
ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on 
the top of it. The solitary exception was the 
New Church; a stuccoed edifice, with a square 
steeple over the door, terminating in four short 
pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the 
public inscriptions in the town were painted 
alike, in severe characters of black and white. 
The jail might have been the infirmary, the 
infirmary might have been the jail, the town- 
hall might have been either, or both, or any- 
thing else, for anything that appeared to the 
contrary in the graces of their construction. 
Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material 
aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere 
in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild 
school was all fact, and the school of design 
was all fact, and the relations between master 
and man were all fact, and everything was fact 
between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, 
and what you couldn't state in figures, or show 
107 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Unco' Guid and the Unco* Rich 

to be purchasable in the cheapest market and 
salable in the dearest, was not, and never 
should be, world without end, amen. 

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant 
in its assertion, of course got on well! Why, 
no, not quite well. No? Dear me! 

No. Coketown did not come out of its own 
furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood 
the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the 
place was, Who belonged to the eighteen de- 
nominations ? Because, whoever did, the labour- 
ing people did not. It was very strange to walk 
through the streets on a Sunday morning, and 
note how few of them the barbarous jangling 
of bells that was driving the sick and the ner- 
vous mad, called away from their own quarter, 
from their own close rooms, from the corners 
of their own close streets, where they lounged 
listlessly, gazing at all the church-and-chapel- 
going, as at a thing with which they had no 
manner of concern. Nor was it merely the 
stranger who noticed this, because there was a 
native organization in Coketown itself, whose 
108 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Unco* Guid and the Unco' Rich 

members were to be heard of in the House of 
Commons every session, indignantly petitioning 
for acts of parliament that should make these 
people religious by main force. Then, came 
the teetotal society, who complained that these 
same people would get drunk, and showed in 
tabular statements that they did get drunk, and 
proved at tea-parties that no inducement, hu- 
man or Divine (except a medal), would induce 
them to forego their custom of getting drunk. 
Then came the chemist and druggist, with 
other tabular statements, outdoing all the pre- 
vious tabular statements, and showing that the 
same people would resort to low haunts, hidden 
from the public eye, where they heard low sing- 
ing and saw low dancing, and, mayhap, joined 
in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next 
birthday, and committed for eighteen months' 
solitary, had himself said (not that he had shown 
himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin 
began, as he was perfectly sure and confident 
that otherwise he would have been a tip-top 
moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind 
109 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Unco' Guid and the Unco' Rich 

and Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this 
present moment walking through Coketown, and 
both eminently practical, who could, on occa- 
sion, furnish more tabular statements derived 
from their own personal experience, and illus- 
trated by cases they had known and seen, from 
which it clearly appeared — in short, it was the 
only clear thing in the case — that these same 
people were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that 
do what you would for them they were never 
thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were rest- 
less, gentlemen; that they never knew what they 
wanted; that they lived upon the best, and 
bought fresh butter, and insisted on Mocha 
coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, 
and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unman- 
ageable. In short, it was the moral of the old 
nursery fable: 

There was an old woman, and what do you think ! 

She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink: 
Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet, 

And yet this old woman would never be quiet. 

Hard Times, 
no 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



The Diaries of the Wicked 



HPHERE are some men who, living with the 
one object of enriching themselves, no 
matter by what means, and being perfectly con- 
scious of the baseness and rascality of the means 
which they use every day toward this end, affect 
nevertheless — even to themselves — a high tone 
of moral rectitude and shake their heads and 
sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of 
the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this 
earth, or rather — for walking implies, at least, 
an erect position and the bearing of a man — 
that ever crawled and crept through life by its 
dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot 
down in diaries the events of every day, and keep 
a regular debtor and creditor account with 
heaven, which shall always show a floating 
balance in their own favour. Whether this is a 
gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the 
falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or 
whether they really hope to cheat heaven itself, 
and lay up treasure in the next world by the 
same process which has enabled them to lay up 
treasure in this — not to question how it is, so it 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Diaries of the Wicked 



is. And doubtless such book-keeping (like cer- 
tain autobiographies which have enlightened 
the world) cannot fail to prove serviceable, in 
the one respect of sparing the recording angel 
some time and labour. Nicholas Nickleby. 

The Man of Facts 

'"THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of 
realities. A man of facts and calcula- 
tions. A man who proceeds upon the principle 
that two and two are four, and nothing over, 
and who is not to be talked into allowing 
for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir — 
peremptorily Thomas — Thomas Gradgrind. 
With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multi- 
plication-table always in his pocket, sir, ready 
to weigh and measure any parcel of human na- 
ture, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It 
is a mere question of figures, a case of simple 
arithmetic. You might hope to get some other 
nonsensical belief into the head of George 
Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John 

112 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Man of Facts 

Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all suppo- 
sititious, non-existent persons), but into the 
head of Thomas Gradgrind — no, sir! 

Hard Times. 

The Scorner of Ideals 

1LTE was a rich man: banker, merchant, manu- 
facturer, and what not. A big loud man, 
with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man made 
out of a coarse material, which seemed to have 
been stretched to make so much of him. A man 
with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled 
veins in his temples, and such a strained skin 
to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open 
and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a per- 
vading appearance on him of being inflated like 
a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could 
never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. 
A man who was always proclaiming, through 
that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, 
his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man 
who was the bully of humility. Hard Times. 
113 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Memorable Day in Every Life 

'T'HAT was a memorable day to me, for it 
made great changes in me. But it is the 
same with any life. Imagine one selected day 
struck out of it, and think how different its 
course would have been. Pause you who read 
this, and think for a moment of the long chain 
of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would 
never have bound you, but for the formation of 
the first link on one memorable day. 

Great Expectations. 

The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

"^Xf HENEVER tne c l° tn was kid f° r dinner, 
my father began rattling the plates and 
dishes, as we do in our line when we put up 
crockery for a bid, only he had lost the trick of 
it, mostly let 'em drop and broke 'em. As the 
old lady had been used to sit in the cart, and 
hand the articles out one by one to the old 
gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the 
same way she handed him every item of the 
family's property, and they disposed of it in 

114 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

their own imaginations from morning to night. 
At last the old gentleman, lying bedridden in the 
same room with the old lady, cries out in the old 
patter, fluent, after having been silent for two 
days and nights: "Now here, my jolly com- 
panions every one, — which the Nightingale 
club in a village was held, At the Sign of the 
Cabbage and Shears, Where the singers no 
doubt would have greatly excelled, But for 
want of taste, voices, and ears, — now, here, my 
jolly companions, every one, is a working model 
of a used-up old Cheap Jack, without a tooth 
in his head, and with a pain in every bone: so 
like life that it would be just as good if it wasn't 
better, just as bad if it wasn't worse, and just 
as new if it wasn't worn out. Bid for the work- 
ing model of the old Cheap Jack, who has 
drunk more gunpowder-tea with the ladies in his 
time than would blow the lid off a washer- 
woman's copper, and carry it as many thou- 
sands of miles higher than the moon as naught 
nix naught, divided by the national debt, carry 
nothing to the poor rates, three under, and two 

"5 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

over. Now, my hearts of oak, and men of 
straw, what do you say for the lot ? Two shil- 
lings, a shilling, tenpence, eightpence, sixpence, 
fourpence. Twopence ? Who said twopence ? 
The gentleman in the scarecrow's hat ? I am 
ashamed of the gentleman in the scarecrow's 
hat. I really am ashamed of him for his want 
of public spirit. Now I'll tell you what I'll do 
with you. Come! I'll throw you in a working 
model of a old woman that was married to the 
old Cheap Jack so long ago that upon my word 
and honour it took place in Noah's Ark, before 
the Unicorn could get in to forbid the banns by 
blowing a tune upon his horn. There now! 
Come! What do you say for both? I'll tell 
you what I'll do with you. I don't bear you 
malice for being so backward. Here! If you 
make me a bid that'll only reflect a little credit 
on your town, I'll throw you in a warming- 
pan for nothing, and lend you a toasting-fork 
for life. Now come; what do you say after 
that splendid offer ? Say two pound, say thirty 
shillings, say a pound, say ten shillings, say five, 
116 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at. His Trade and at Home 

say two and six. You don't say even two and 
six ? You say two and three ? No. You 
shan't have the lot for two and three. I'd 
sooner give it to you, if you was good-looking 
enough. Here! Missis! Chuck the old man 
and woman into the cart, put the horse to, and 
drive 'em away and bury 'em!" Such were 
the last words of Willum Marigold, my own 
father, and they were carried out, by him and 
by his wife, my own mother, on one and the 
same day, as I ought to know, having followed 
as mourner. 

My father had been a lovely one in his time 
at the Cheap Jack work, as his dying observa- 
tions went to prove. But I top him. I don't 
say it because it's myself, but because it has 
been universally acknowledged by all that has 
had the means of comparison. I have worked 
at it. I have measured myself against other 
public speakers, — Members of Parliament, 
Platforms, Pulpits, Counsel learned in the law, 
— and where I have found 'em good, I have let 
'em alone. Now I'll tell you what. I mean to 
"7 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

go down into my grave declaring that of all the 
callings ill used in Great Britain, the Cheap 
Jack calling is the worst used. Why a'n't we 
a profession ? Why ain't we endowed with 
privileges ? Why are we forced to take out a 
hawker's license, when no such thing is ex- 
pected of the political hawkers ? Where's the 
difference betwixt us ? Except that we are 
Cheap Jacks and they are Dear Jacks, I don't 
see any difference but what's in our favour. 

For look here! Say it's election time. I am 
on the footboard of my cart in the market-place 
on a Saturday night. I put up a general mis- 
cellaneous lot, I say: "Now here, my free and 
independent woters, I'm a going to give you such 
a chance as you never had in all your born days, 
nor yet the days preceding. Now I'll show you 
what I am a going to do with you. Here's a 
pair of razors that'll shave you closer than the 
Board of Guardians; here's a flat-iron worth 
its weight in gold; here's a frying-pan artifi- 
cially flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to 
that degree that you've only got for the rest of 
118 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and 
there you are replete with animal food; here's 
a genuine chronometer-watch in such a solid 
silver case that you may knock at the door with 
it when you come home late from a social meet- 
ing, and rouse your wife and family, and save 
up your knocker for the postman; and here's 
half a dozen dinner plates that you may play 
the cymbals with to charm the baby when it's 
fractious. Stop! I'll throw you in another 
article, and I'll give you that, and it's a rolling- 
pin; and if the baby can only get it well into 
its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the 
gums over with it, they'll come through double, 
in a fit of laughter equal to being tickled. Stop 
again! I'll throw you in another article, be- 
cause I don't like the looks of you, for you 
haven't the appearance of buyers unless I lose 
by you, and because I'd rather lose than not 
take money to-night, and that's a looking-glass 
in which you may see how ugly you look when 
you don't bid. What do you say now! Come! 
Do you say a pound ? Not you, for you haven't 
iz9 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

got it. Do you say ten shillings ? Not you, 
for you owe more to the tallyman. Well then, 
1*11 tell you what 1*11 do with you. I'll heap 'em 
all on the footboard of the cart, — there they 
are! razors, flat-iron, frying-pan, chronometer- 
watch, dinner-plates, rolling-pin, and looking- 
glass, — take 'em all away for four shillings, and 
I'll give you sixpence for your trouble ! " This is 
me, the Cheap Jack. But on the Monday 
morning, in the same market-place, comes the 
Dear Jack on the hustings — his cart — and what 
does he say ? " Now my free and independent 
woters. I am a going to give you such a chance" 
(he begins just like me) "as you never had in 
all your born days, and that's the chance of 
sending Myself to Parliament. Now I'll tell 
you what I am a going to do for you. Here's 
the interest of this magnificent town promoted 
above all the rest of the civilized and uncivilized 
earth. Here's your railways carried, and your 
neighbours' railways jockeved. Here's all your 
sons in the Post-Office. Here's Britannia 
smiling on you. Here's the eyes of Europe on 

120 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

you. Here's uniwersal prosperity for you, re- 
pletion of animal food, golden corn-fields, glad- 
some homesteads, and rounds of applause from 
your own hearts, all in one lot, and that's my- 
self. Will you take me as I stand ? You 
won't? Well, then I'll tell you what I'll do 
with you. Come now! I'll throw you in any- 
thing you ask for. There! Church-rates, abo- 
lition of church-rates, more malt-tax, no malt- 
tax, uniwersal education to the highest mark, 
or uniwersal ignorance to the lowest, total 
abolition of flogging in the army, or a dozen for 
every private once a month all round, Wrongs 
of Men or Rights of Women, — only say which 
it shall be, take 'em or leave 'em, and I'm of 
your opinion altogether, and the lot's your own 
on your own terms. There! You won't take 
it yet! Well, then, I'll tell you what I'll do 
with you. Come! You are such free and inde- 
pendent woters, and I am so proud of you, — 
you are such a noble and enlightened constit- 
uency, and I am so ambitious of the honour 
and dignity of being your member, which is by 
121 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

far the highest level to which the wings of the 
human mind can soar, — that I'll tell you what 
I'll do with you. I'll throw you in all the pub- 
lic-houses in your magnificent town for nothing. 
Will that content you ? It won't ? You won't 
take the lot yet ? Well, then, before I put the 
horse in and drive away, and make the offer to 
the next most magnificent town that can be 
discovered, I'll tell you what I'll do. Take the 
lot, and I'll drop two thousand pound in the 
streets of your magnificent town for them to 
pick up that can. Not enough ? Now look here! 
This is the furthest that I'm a going to. I'll 
make it two thousand five hundred. And still 
you won't? Here, missis! Put the horse — 
no, stop half a moment, I shouldn't like to turn 
my back upon you neither for a trifle, I'll make 
it two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound. 
There! Take the lot on your own terms, and 
I'll count out two thousand seven hundred and 
fifty pound on the footboard of the cart, to be 
dropped in the streets of your magnificent town 
for them to pick up that can. What do you 

122 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

say? Come now! You won't do better, and 
you may do worse. You take it? Hooray! 
Sold again, and got the seat!" 

These Dear Jacks soap the people shameful, 
but we Cheap Jacks don't. We tell 'em the 
truth about themselves to their faces, and scorn 
to court 'em. As to wenturesomeness in the 
way of puffing up the lots, the Dear Jacks beat 
us hollow. It is considered in the Cheap Jack 
calling, that better patter can be made out of a 
gun than any article we put up from the cart, 
except a pair of spectacles. I often hold forth 
about a gun for a quarter of an hour and feel as 
if I never need leave off. But when I tell 'em 
what the gun can do, and what the gun has 
brought down, I never go half so far as the Dear 
jacks do when they make speeches in praise of 
their guns — their great guns that set 'em on to 
do it. Besides, I'm in business for myself; I 
ain't sent down into the market-place to order, 
as they are. Besides, again, my guns don't 
know what I say in their laudation, and their 
guns do, and the whole concern of 'em have 
123 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

reason to be sick and ashamed all round. These 
are some of my arguments for declaring that 
the Cheap Jack calling is treated ill in Great 
Britain, and for turning warm when I think of 
the other Jacks in question setting themselves 
up to pretend to look down upon it. 

I courted my wife from the footboard of the 
cart. I did indeed. She was a Suffolk young 
woman, and it was in Ipswich market-place 
right opposite the corn-chandler's shop. I had 
noticed her up at a window last Saturday that 
was, appreciating highly. I had took to her, 
and I had said to myself, "If not already dis- 
posed of, I'll have that lot." Next Saturday 
that come, I pitched the cart on the same pitch, 
and I was in very high feather indeed, keeping 
'em laughing the whole of the time, and getting 
off the goods briskly. At last I took out of my 
waistcoat-pocket a small lot wrapped in soft 
paper, and I put it this way (looking up at the 
window where she was). "Now here, my 
blooming English maidens, is an article, the 
last article of the evening's sale, which I offer 
124 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

to only you, the lovely Suffolk Dumplings biling 
over with beauty, and I won't take a bid of a 
thousand pounds for it from any man alive. 
Now what is it ? Why, I'll tell you what it is. 
It's made of fine gold, and it's not broke, though 
there's a hole in the middle of it, and it's stronger 
than any fetter that ever was forged, though it's 
smaller than any finger in my set of ten. Why 
ten ? Because, when my parents made over 
my property to me, I tell you true, there was 
twelve sheets, twelve towels, twelve table-cloths, 
twelve knives, twelve forks, twelve tablespoons, 
and twelve teaspoons, but my set of fingers was 
two short of a dozen, and could never since be 
matched. Now what else is it ? Come, I'll 
tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold, wrapped in 
a silver curl-paper, that I myself took off the 
shining locks of the ever beautiful old lady in 
Threadneedle street, London city;- I wouldn't 
tell you so if I hadn't the paper to show, or you 
mightn't believe it even of me. Now what else 
is it ? It's a man-trap and a handcuff, the 
parish-stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all 
125 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Philosophy of a Cheap Jack at His Trade and at Home 

in one. Now what else is it ? It's a wedding- 
ring. Now I'll tell you what I'm going to do 
with it. I'm not a going to offer this lot for 
money; but I mean to give it to the next of you 
beauties that laughs, and I'll pay her a visit 
to-morrow morning at exactly half after nine 
o'clock as the chimes go, and I'll take her out 
for a walk to put up the banns." She laughed, 
and got the ring handed up to her. When I 
called in the morning, she says, "Oh dear! It's 
never you, and you never mean it?" "It's 
ever me," says I, "and I am ever yours, and I 
ever mean it." So we got married, after being 
put up three times — which, by the bye, is quite 
in the Cheap Jack way again, and shows once 
more how the Cheap Jack customs pervade 
Society. Doctor Marigold's Prescription. 

Womanly Temper — Especially when living in a Cart 

CHE wasn't a bad wife, but she had a temper. 
If she could have parted with that one 
article at a sacrifice, I wouldn't have swopped 
126 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Womanly Temper — Especially when living in a Cart 

her away in exchange for any other woman in 
England. Not that I ever did swop her away, 
for we lived together till she died, and that was 
thirteen year. Now, my lords and ladies and 
gentlefolks all, I'll let you into a secret, though 
you won't believe it. Thirteen year of Temper 
in a Palace would try the worst of you, but 
thirteen year of temper in a Cart would try the 
best of you. You are kept so very close to it in 
a cart, you see. There's thousands of couples 
among you getting on like sweet ile upon a 
whetstone in houses five and six pairs of stairs 
high, that would go to the Divorce Court in a 
cart. Whether the jolting makes it worse, I 
don't undertake to decide; but in a cart it does 
come home to you, and stick to you. Wiolence 
in a cart is so wiolent, and aggrawation in a cart 
is so aggrawating. 

We might have had such a pleasant life! A 
roomy cart, with the large goods hung outside, 
and the bed slung underneath it when on the 
road, an iron pot and a kettle, a fire-place for 
the cold weather, a chimney for the smoke, a 
127 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Womanly Temper — Especially when living in a Cart 

hanging-shelf and a cupboard, a dog and a 
horse. What more do you want ? You draw 
off upon a bit of turf in a green lane or by the 
roadside, you hobble your old horse and turn 
him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes 
of the last visitors, you cook your stew, and you 
wouldn't call the Emperor of France your 
father. But have a temper in the cart, flinging 
language and the hardest goods in stock at you, 
and where are you then ? Put a name to your 
feelings. Doctor Marigold's Prescription. 

The Hand the Index to God's Goodness 

ONG may it remain in this mixed world a 
point not easy of decision, which is the 
more beautiful evidence of the Almighty's good- 
ness—the delicate fingers that are formed for 
sensitiveness and sympathy of touch, and made 
to minister to pain and grief, or the rough hard 
Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, 
guides, and softens in a moment! 

Dombey and Son. 
128 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Sense of Injustice in Children 

TN the little world in which children have 
their existence, whatsoever brings them up, 
there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely 
felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice 
that the child can be exposed to; but the child 
is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many 
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned 
Irish hunter. Great Expectations. 

The Young Person 



TT was an inconvenient and exacting institu- 
tion, as requiring everything in the uni- 
verse to be filed down and fitted to it. The 
question about everything was, could it bring 
a blush into the cheek of the young person ? 
And the inconvenience of the young person 
was, that, according to Mr. Podsnap, she 
seemed always liable to burst into blushes, 
when there was no need at all. There appeared 
to be no line of demarcation between the young 
person's excessive innocence, and another per- 
son's guiltiest knowledge. Take Mr. Pod- 
129 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Young Person 

snap's word for it, and the soberest tints of 
drab, white, lilac, and gray, were all flaming 
red to this troublesome bull of a young person. 

Our Mutual Friend. 

Duty — the Braggart 

Q LATE-REMEMBERED, much-forgotten, 
^^ mouthing, braggart Duty, always owed, and 
seldom paid in any other coin than punishment 
and wrath, when will mankind begin to know 
thee! When will men acknowledge thee in 
thy neglected cradle, and thy stunted youth, 
and not begin their recognition in thy sinful 
manhood and thy desolate old age! O er- 
mined judge whose duty to society is, now, to 
doom the ragged criminal to punishment and 
death, hadst thou never, man, a duty to dis- 
charge in barring up the hundred open gates 
that wooed him to the felon's dock, and throw- 
ing but ajar the portals to a decent life! O prel- 
ate, prelate, whose duty to society it is to mourn 
in melancholy phrase the sad degeneracy of these 
130 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



Duty — the Braggart 



bad times in which thy lot of honours has been 
cast, did nothing go before thy elevation to the 
lofty seat, from which thou dealest out thy 
homilies to other tarriers for dead men's shoes, 
whose duty to society had not begun! O 
magistrate, so rare a country gentleman and 
brave a squire, had you no duty to society, 
before the ricks were blazing and the mob were 
mad; or did it spring up, armed and booted 
from the earth, a corps of yeomanry, full- 
grown! Martin Cbnzzleivit. 



The American Eagle 



44\X7HY, I was a thinking, sir/' returned 
Mark, "that if I was a painter and was 
called upon to paint the American Eagle, how 
should I doit?" 

"Paint it as like an eagle as you could, I 
suppose." 

"No," said Mark. "That wouldn't do for 
me, sir. I should want to draw it like a bat, 
for its short-sightedness; like a bantam for 
131 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The American Eagle 

its bragging; like a magpie, for its honesty; 
like a peacock, for its vanity; like an ostrich, 
for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking 

nobody sees it " 

"And like a phoenix, for its power of spring- 
ing from the ashes of its faults and vices, and 
soaring up anew into the sky!" said Martin. 

Martin Ckuzzlewit. 

The Philosophy of Catching a Hat in the Wind 

' I A HERE are very few moments in a man's 
existence when he experiences so much 
ludicrous distress, or meets with so little chari- 
table commiseration, as when he is in pursuit 
of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and 
a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in 
catching a hat. A man must not be precipi- 
tate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into 
the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. 
The best way is, to keep gently up with the 
object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to 
watch your opportunity well, get gradually 
132 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Philosophy of Catching a Hat in the Wind 

before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the 
crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling 
pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as 
good a joke as anybody else. 

Pickwick Papas. 

The Long-suffering of Women. 



r\ WOMAN, God beloved in old Jerusalem ! 
^^ The best among us need deal lightly with 
thy faults, if only for the punishment thy nature 
will endure, in bearing heavy evidence against 
us, on the Day of Judgment! 

Martin Chuzzleivit. 



There's a Soft Place in the Hardest of Hearts 

COMMERCIAL gentlemen and gravy had 
tried Mrs. Todger's temper; the main 
chance — it was such a very small one in her 
case that she might have been excused for look- 
ing sharp after it, lest it should entirely vanish 
from her sight — had taken a firm hold on Mrs. 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



There's a Soft Place in the Hardest of Hearts 

Todger's attention. But in some odd nook in 
Mrs. Todger's breast, up a great many steps, 
and in a corner easy to be overlooked, there 
was a secret door, with "Woman" written on 
the spring, which, at a touch from Mercy's hand 
had flown wide open, and admitted her for 
shelter. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

The Miser — A Rogue Restrained by Miserly Instincts 

HPHIS fine young man had all the inclination 
to be a profligate of the first water, and 
only lacked the one good trait in the common 
catalogue of debauched vices — open-handed- 
ness — to be a notable vagabond. But there 
his griping and penurious habits stepped in; 
and as one poison will sometimes neutralize 
another, when wholesome remedies will not 
avail, so he was restrained by a bad passion 
from quaffing his full measure of evil, w T hen 
virtue might have sought to hold him back in 
vain. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

*34 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
An Author's Fame 

TT is such things as these that make one hope 
one does not live in vain, and that are the 
highest rewards of an author's life. To be num- 
bered among the household gods of one's dis- 
tant countrymen, and associated with their 
homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in 
each nook and corner of the world's great mass 
there lives one well-wisher who holds commun- 
ion with one in the spirit, is a worthy fame 
indeed, and one which I would not barter 
for a mine of wealth. 

Letter to Mr. John Tomlin. 

Americans Tender to Criticism 

TF another Juvenal or Swift could rise among 
us to-morrow, he would be hunted down. 
If you have any knowledge of our literature, 
and can give me the name of any man, American- 
born and bred, who has anatomized our follies 
as a people, and not as this or that party; and 
who has escaped the foulest and most brutal 
slander, the most inveterate hatred and in- 
i35 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Americans Tender to Criticism 

tolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in 
my ears, believe me. In some cases I could 
name to you, where a native writer had ven- 
tured on the most harmless and good-humoured 
illustrations of our vices or defects, it has been 
found necessary to announce that in a second 
edition the passage has been expunged, or 
altered, or explained away, or patched into 
praise. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

A Doctor — the Type 

TN certain quarters of the city and its neigh- 
bourhood, Mr. Jobling was ... a very 
popular character. He had a portentously 
sagacious chin, and a pompous voice, with a 
rich huskiness in some of its tones that went 
directly to the heart, like a ray. of light shining 
through the ruddy medium of choice old bur- 
gundy. His neckerchief and shirt frill were 
ever of the whitest, his clothes of the blackest 
and sleekest, his gold watch-chain of the heaviest, 
and his seals of the largest. His boots, which 
136 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
A Doctor — the Type 

were always of the brightest, creaked as he 
walked. Perhaps he could shake his head, 
rub his hands, or warm himself before a fire 
better than any man alive; and he had a pecul- 
iar way of smacking his lips and saying, "Ah!" 
at intervals while patients detailed their symp- 
toms, which inspired great confidence. It 
seemed to express, " I know what you're going 
to say better than you do; but go on, go on." 
As he talked on all occasions, whether he had 
anything to say or not, it was unanimously 
observed of him that he was "full of anecdote," 
and his experience and profit from it were con- 
sidered, for the same reason, to be something 
much too extensive for description. His female 
patients could never praise him too highly; 
and the coldest of his male admirers would 
always say this for him to their friends, "that 
whatever Jobling's professional skill might 
be (and it could not be denied that he had a 
very high reputation) he was one of the most 
comfortable fellows you ever saw in your life! 

Martin Cbuzzlewit. 

m 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Cure for the Gout 

44HTHE gout, sir," replied Mr. Weller, "the 
gout is a complaint as arises from too 
much ease and comfort. If ever you're at- 
tacked with the gout, sir, jist you marry a widder 
as has got a good loud woice, with a decent 
notion of usin' it, and you'll never have the 
gout agin. It's a capital prescription, sir. I 
takes it reg'lar, and I can warrant it to drive 
away any illness as is caused by too much 
jollity." The Pickivick Papers. 

The Old-time Sick Nurse and Midwife 

CHE was a fat old woman, this Mrs. Gamp, 
with a husky voice and a moist eye, which 
she had a remarkable power of turning up and 
only showing the white of it. Having very 
little neck, it cost her some trouble to look over 
herself, if one may say so, at those to whom she 
talked. She wore a very rusty black gown, 
rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and 
bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated 
articles of dress she had, on principle, arrayed 
138 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Old-time Sick Nurse and Midwife 

herself, time out of mind, on such occasions as 
the present, for this at once expressed a decent 
amount of veneration for the deceased, and 
invited the next of kin to present her with a 
fresher suit of weeds, an appeal so frequently 
successful, that the very fetch and ghost of 
Mrs. Gamp, bonnet and all, might be seen 
hanging up, any hour in the day, in at least a 
dozen of the second-hand clothes shops about 
Holborn. The face of Mrs. Gamp — the nose 
in particular —was somewhat red and swollen, 
and it was difficult to enjoy her society without 
becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like 
most persons who have attained to great emi- 
nence in their profession, she took hers very 
kindly; insomuch that, setting aside her natural 
predilections as a woman, she went to a lying- 
in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish. 

"Ah!" repeated Mrs. Gamp; for it was 
always a safe sentiment in cases of mourning. 
"Ah, dear! When Gamp was summoned to his 
long home, and I see him a lying in Guy's 
Hospital with a penny piece on each eye, and 
i39 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Old-time Sick Nurse and Midwife 

his wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I 
should have fainted away. But I bore up." 

If certain whispers current in the Kingsgate 
Street circles had any truth in them, she had 
indeed borne up surprisingly; and had exerted 
such uncommon fortitude, as to dispose of Mr. 
Gamp's remains for the benefit of science. 
But it should be added, in fairness, that this 
had happened twenty years before; and that 
Mr. and Mrs. Gamp had long been separated 
on the ground of incompatibility of temper in 
their drink. 

"You have become indifferent since then, 
I suppose?" said Mr. Pecksniff. "Use is sec- 
ond nature, Mrs. Gamp." 

"You may well say second nater, sir," 
returned that lady. "One's first ways is to 
find sich things a trial to the feelings, and so 
is one's lasting custom. If it wasn't for the 
nerve a little sip of liquor gives me (I never was 
able to do more than taste it), I never could go 
through with what I sometimes has to do. 'Mrs. 
Harris,' I says, at the very last case as ever I 
140 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Old-time Sick Nurse and Midwife 

acted in, which it was but a young person, 
'Mrs. Harris/ I says, 'leave the bottle on the 
chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, 
but let me put my lips to it when I am so dis- 
poged, and then I will do what I'm engaged to 
do, according to the best of my ability.' 'Mrs. 
Gamp,' she says, in answer, 'if ever there was a 
sober creetur to be got at eighteen-pence a day, 
for working people, and three and six for gentle- 
folks — night-watching,' " said Mrs. Gamp with 
emphasis, "'being an extra charge — you are 
that inwallable person.' 'Mrs. Harris,' says 1 
to her, 'don't name the charge, for if I could 
afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for 
nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I 
bears 'em. But what I always says to them as 
has the management of matters, Mrs. Harris,'" 
— here she kept her eye on Mr. Pecksniff — 
"'be they gents or be they ladies, is, don't ask 
me whether I won't take none, or whether I 
will, but leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, 
and let me put my lips to it when I am so dis- 
poged." Martin Cbuzzlewit. 

141 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Toiling Poor and Their Reformers 

r\ MORALISTS, who treat of happiness and 
^"^ self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, 
and shedding light on every grain of dust in 
God's highway, so smooth below your carriage- 
wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, 
bethink yourselves in looking on the swift 
descent of men who have lived in their own 
esteem, that there are scores of thousands 
breathing now, and breathing thick with pain- 
ful toil, who in that high respect have never 
lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go ye, 
who rest so placidly upon the sacred bard who 
had been young, and when he strung his harp 
was old, and had never seen the righteous for- 
saken, or his seed begging their bread; go, 
teachers of content and honest pride, into the 
mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of 
deepest ignorance and uttermost abyss of man's 
neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring 
up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's 
bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! 
ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of 
Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to 
142 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Toiling Poor and Their Reformers 

human nature, see that it be human first. Take 
heed it has not been transformed, during your 
slumber and the sleep of generations, into the 
nature of beasts. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

Rogues are the Most Credulous of Beings 

nPHERE is a simplicity of cunning no less 
than a simplicity of innocence; and in all 
matters where a lively faith in knavery and 
meanness was required as the ground-work of 
belief, the rogue is one of the most credulous of 
men. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

Servant and Master 



'"jPHE incompetent servant, by whomsoever 
employed, is always against his employer. 
Even those born governors, noble and right 
honourable creatures, who have been the most 
imbecile in high places, have uniformly shown 
themselves the most opposed (sometimes in 
belying distrust, sometimes in vapid insolence) 
i43 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Servant and Master 

to their employer. What is in such wise true 
of the public master and servant, is equally true 
of the private master and servant, all the world 
over. Our Mutual Friend. 



The "Gushing Girl" of a Respectable Father 

FT must not be inferred . . . that the youngest 
Miss Pecksniff was so young as to be, as 
one may say, forced to sit upon a stool, by rea- 
son of the shortness of her legs. Miss Peck- 
sniff sat upon a stool, because of her simplicity 
and innocence, which were very great — very 
great. Miss Pecksniff sat upon a stool, be- 
cause she was all girlishness, and playfulness, 
and wildness, and kittenish buoyancy. She 
was the most arch and, at the same time, the 
most artless creature, was the youngest Miss 
Pecksniff, that you can possibly imagine. It 
was her great charm. She was too fresh and 
guileless, and too full of childlike vivacity, was 
the youngest Miss Pecksniff, to wear combs in 
her hair, or to turn it up, or to frizzle it, or braid 
i44 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The "Gushing Girl" of a Respectable Father 

it. She wore it in a crop, a loosely flowing 
crop, which had so many rows of curls in it, 
that the top row was only one curl. Moderately 
huxom was her shape, and quite womanly too; 
but sometimes — yes, sometimes — she even wore 
a pinafore; and how charming that was! Oh! 
she was indeed "a gushing thing" (as a young 
gentleman had observed in verse, in the poet's 
corner of a provincial newspaper), was the 
youngest Miss Pecksniff! 

Martin Chuzzlewit. 



Records of Old Families 

FT is remarkable that, as there was, in the 
oldest family of which we have any record, 
a murderer and a vagabond, so we never fail 
to meet, in the records of all old families, with in- 
numerable repetitions of the same phase of char- 
acter. Indeed, it may be laid down as a general 
principle, that the more extended the ancestry 
the greater the amount of violence and vaga- 
bondism; for in ancient days, those two amuse- 
H5 



THE WISUO M O 1 D 1 C K E N S 
Records of Old Families 

merits, combining a wholesome excitement 
with a promising means of repairing shattered 
fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit 
and the healthful recreation of the quality of 
this land [England]. Martin Chuzzlewit. 

The Books Dickens Read as a Boy 



TV/TY father had left a small collection of books 
in a little room upstairs, to which I had 
access (for it joined my own) and which no- 
body else in our house ever troubled. From 
that blessed little room, Roderick Random, 
Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom 
Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, 
Gil Bias, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a 
glorious host, to keep me company. They 
kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something 
beyond that place and time — they, and the 
Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii — 
and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in 
some of them was not there for me, I knew 
nothing of it. ... I have been Tom Jones (a 
146 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Books Dickens Read as a Boy 

child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for 
a week together. I have sustained my own idea 
of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, 
I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a 
few volumes of Voyages and Travels— I forget 
what, now — that were in those shelves; and for 
days and days I can remember to have gone 
about my region of our house, armed with the 
centre-piece of an old set of boot-trees — the per- 
fect realization of Captain Somebody, of the 
Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset 
by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a 
great price. The Captain never lost dignity, 
from having his ears boxed with the Latin 
Grammar, I did; but the Captain was a Cap- 
tain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars 
of all the languages in the world, dead or alive. 
This was my only and my constant comfort. 
When I think of it, the picture always rises in 
my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at 
play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, 
reading as if for life. Every barn in the neigh- 
bourhood, every stone in the church, and every 
i47 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



The Books Dickens Read as a Boy 



foot in the churchyard had some association of 
its own, in my mind, connected with these 
books, and stood for some locality made famous 
in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing 
up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, 
with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest 
himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that 
Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. 
Pickle, in the parlour of our little village ale- 
house - David Copperfield. 



The Respectable Englishman 



JT has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was 
a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there 
never was a more moral man than Mr. Peck- 
sniff, especially in his conversation and corre- 
spondence. It was once said of him by a 
homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus's 
purse of gold sentiments in his inside. In this 
particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, 
except that, if they were not actual diamonds 
which fell from his lips, they were the very 
148 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Respectable Englishman 



brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He 
was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous 
precept than a copy-book. Some people li- 
kened him to a direction post, which is always 
telling the way to a place, and never goes there; 
but these were his enemies! — the shadows cast 
by his brightness — that was all. His very 
throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. 
You looked over a very low fence of white 
cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the 
tie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, 
a valley between two jutting heights of collar, 
serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed 
to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, " There is 
no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace; 
a holy calm pervades me." So did his hair, 
just grizzled with an iron-gray, which was all 
brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt up- 
right, or slightly drooped in kindred action with 
his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which 
was sleek, though free from corpulency. So 
did his manner, which was soft and oily. In 
a word, even his plain black suit, and state of 
149 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

The Respectable Englishman 

widower, and dangling double eyeglass, all 
tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, 
"Behold the moral Pecksniff!" ... His ene- 
mies asserted, by the way, that a strong trust- 
fulness in sounds and forms was the master- 
key to Mr. Pecksniff's character. 

Martin Chuzzlewit. 

Memory of Very Early Childhood 

THINK the memory of most of us can go far- 
ther back into such times than many of us 
suppose. Just as I believe the power of obser- 
vation in numbers of very young children to be 
quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. 
Indeed I think that most grown men who are 
remarkable in this respect may with greater 
propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, 
than to have acquired it; the rather, as I gen- 
erally observe such men to retain a certain fresh- 
ness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, 
which are also an inheritance they have preserved 
from their childhood. David Cop per field, 

150 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Advice to a Young Author 

"VT'OU write to be read, of course. The close 
of the story is unnecessarily painful — will 
throw off numbers of persons who would other- 
wise read it, and who (as it stands) will be de- 
terred by hearsay from so doing, and is so tre- 
mendous a piece of severity, that it will defeat 
your purpose. All my knowledge and experi- 
ence, such as they are, lead me straight to the 
recommendation that you will do well to spare 
the life of the husband, and of one of the chil- 
dren. Let her suppose the former dead, from 
seeing him brought in wounded and insensible 
— lose nothing of the progress of her mental 
suffering afterwards when the doctor is in at- 
tendance upon her — but bring her round at last 
to the blessed surprise that her husband is still 
living, and that a repentance which can be 
worked out, in the way of atonement for the 
misery she has occasioned to the man she so ill 
repaid for his love, and made so miserable, lies 
before her. So will you soften the reader whom 
you now as it were harden, and so you will bring 
tears from many eyes, which can only have 
*5* 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

Advice to a Young Author 

their spring in affectionately and gently touched 
hearts. Letter to Miss Emily Jolly. 

July 17, 1855. 

What Dickens Thought of Washington Irving. 

HP HERE is no man in the world who could 
have given me the heartfelt pleasure you 
have, by your kind note. . . . There is no liv- 
ing writer, and there are very few among the 
dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud 
to earn. And with everything you have written 
upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in 
my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say 
so. If you could know how earnestly I write 
this, you would be glad to read it — as I hope 
you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of 
the hand I autobiographically hold out to you 
over the broad Atlantic. 

I wish I could find in your welcome letter 

some hint of an intention to visit England. . . . 

I should love to go with you — as I have gone, 

God knows how often — into Little Britain, and 

15* 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

What Dickens Thought of Washington Irving 

Eastcheap, and Green Arbour Court, and West- 
minster Abbey. I should like to travel with 
you, outside the last of the coaches down to 
Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart 
glad to compare notes with you about that 
shabby gentleman in the oilcloth hat and red 
nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back-parlour 
of the Masons' Arms; and about Robert Pres- 
ton and the tallow-chandler's widow, whose sit- 
ting-room is second nature to me; and about all 
those delightful places and people that I used 
to walk about and dream of in the daytime, 
when a very small and not over-particularly- 
taken-care-of boy. I have a good deal to say, 
too, about that dashing Alonzo de Ojeda, that 
you can't help being fonder of than you ought 
to be; and much to hear concerning Moorish 
legend, and poor unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich 
Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my 
pocket, and yet I should show you his mutilated 
carcass with a joy past all expression. 

I have been so accustomed to associate you 
with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and 
i S3 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 

What Dickens Thought of Washington Irving 

with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into 
full confidence with you, and fall, as it were 
naturally and by the very laws of gravity, into 
your open arms. Questions come thronging to 
my pen as to the lips of people who meet after 
long hoping to do so. I don't know what to 
say first or what to leave unsaid, and am con- 
stantly disposed to break off* and tell you again 
how glad I am this moment has arrived. 

Letter to Washington Irving. 

1841. 

Our Ignorance of Shakespeare the Man a Comfort 

|*T is a great comfort, to my thinking, that so 
little is known concerning the poet. It is 
a fine mystery; and I tremble every day lest 
something should come out. If he had had a 
Boswell, society wouldn't have respected his 
grave, but would calmly have had his skull in 
the phrenological shop-windows. 

Letter to William Sandys. 

June 13, 1847. 
154 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
The Evils of the Biographer a la Boswell 

r QUESTION very much whether it would 
have been a good thing for every great man 
to have had his Boswell, inasmuch that I think 
two Boswells, or three at most, would have 
made great men extraordinarily false, and would 
have set them on always playing a part, and 
would have made distinguished people about 
them for ever restless and distrustful. I can 
imagine a succession of Boswells bringing about 
a tremendous state of falsehood in society, and 
playing the very devil with confidence and 
friendship. Letter' to Mr. John Forster. 

April 22, 1848. 

Dickens on His Own Genius. The Value of Time to Him 

A NECESSITY is upon me now — as at most 
"^^ times — of wandering about in my old wild 
way, to think. I could no more resist this on 
Sunday or yesterday than a man can dispense 
with food, or a horse can help himself from be- 
ing driven. I hold my inventive capacity on 
the stern condition that it must master my 
x 55 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 
Dickens on His Own Genius. The Value of Time to Him 

whole life, often have complete possession of me, 
make its own demands upon me, and some- 
times, for months together, put everything else 
away from me. If I had not known long ago 
that my place could never be held, unless I were 
at any moment ready to devote myself to it en- 
tirely, I should have dropped out of it very soon. 
All this I can hardly expect you to understand 
— or the restlessness and waywardness of an 
author's mind. You have never seen it before 
you, or lived with it, or had occasion to think 
or care about it, and you cannot have the neces- 
sary consideration for it. "It is only half-an- 
hour," — "It is only an afternoon," — "It is only 
an evening," people say to me over and over 
again; but they don't know that it is impossible 
to command one's self sometimes to any stipu- 
lated and set disposal of five minutes, — or that 
the mere consciousness of an engagement will 
sometimes worry a whole day. These are the 
penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is 
devoted to an art must be content to deliver 
himself wholly up to it, and to find his recom- 
156 



1 H E W I S D O M OF DICKENS 
Dickens on His Own Genius. The Value of Time to Him 



pense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of 
not wanting to see you, but I can't help it; I 
must go mv way whether or no. 

Letter to Mrs. Winter. 

April 3, 1855. 

Forster's Life of Goldsmith 

JT is splendid. I don't believe that any book 
was ever written, or anything ever done or 
said, half so conducive to the dignity and honor 
of literature as "The Life and Adventures of 
Oliver Goldsmith," by J. F., of the Inner Tem- 
ple. The gratitude of every man who is con- 
tent to rest his station and claims quietly on 
literature, and to make no feint of living by 
anything else, is your due for evermore. I have 
often said, here and there, w T hen you have been 
at work upon the book, that I was sure it would 
be; and I shall insist on that debt being due 
to you (though there will be no need for insisting 
about it) as long as I have any tediousness and 
obstinacy to bestow on anybody. Lastly, I 
*57 






THE WISDOM OF D I C K E x\ T S 
Forster's Life of Goldsmith 

never will hear the biography compared with 
BoswelFs except under vigorous protest. For I 
do say that it is mere folly to put into opposite 
scales a book, however amusing and curious, 
written by an unconscious coxcomb like that, 
and one which surveys and grandly understands 
the characters of all the illustrious company 
that move in it. . . . And again I say, most 
solemnly, that literature in England has never 
had, and probably never will have, such a 
champion as you are, in right of this book. 

Letter to Mr. John Forster. 

April, 1848. 



itf 



THE WISDOM OF DICKENS 



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